Reddit to Release Fix for iOS App to Remove Clipboard Copying Behavior

You might say they got caught reddit-handed. ;)

Love how they all call it a „bug“ when it’s probably been there since it was launched in the App Store

That's some impressive bug-work going on there. They've managed to accidentally type all this code to constantly check the clipboard's contents without meaning to.

NotificationCenter.default.addObserver(self, selector: #selector(pasteboardUpdated), name: UIPasteboard.changedNotification, object: nil)

@objc func pasteboardUpdated(){
if let stolenData = UIPasteboard.general.string {
//Insert code here to steal clipboard contents...
}
}

People keep saying things like "I can't see any reason to allow apps to have clipboard access". Well, you need to think harder then.

Apples own apps do things such as reading SMS messages from Apple, to get 2FA codes for logging in, so you don't need to copy and paste that data. Other apps don't have as deep linking capabilities that Apples ones do, but in an attempt to recreate it, they have used clipboards. I have a parcel tracking app - if I copy a tracking number from an email and then open Parcel, it auto-fills the details with the tracking number from the clipboard. So there's one use for it, on one app I have. How many others are doing cool things?

Also I do buy the Tik-Tok anti-spam excuse. Twitter, Facebook and other such apps are absolutely filled the brim with bot. By detecting keystrokes you can work out if it's a bot of a person typing. Bots probably don't type letter by letter - a person does. A person types at inconsistent pacing, whilst a bot would be perfect. A person would use the backspace key for mistakes, etc etc. It's comparing what the person is typing to the clipboard to try and work out if it's a person, and if it's a person, are they just pasting spam messages in constantly.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying apps should all have this access to the clipboard. But with just a tiny bit of thought, it's quite easy to see how and why apps are doing this. But the practice should stop and move onto better ways of doing things.

If you have an iphone and are NOT using Apollo for reddit...you are really missing out. It is 1000000000x better than the stock reddit app. Crazy because its developed and maintained by ONE guy.

Well said, it’s probably all a lot less malicious than it seems. It could even be that there are some negative consequences in terms of app experience due to the hysteria.

This needs to become a permission "App XYZ wants to monitor your clipboard" so that we can make a choice which apps to trust with our clipboards, and which not. This has been raised on the Apple forums, Reddit etc for eons.

Frankly this should have been done like a decade ago.