Linked List: December 1, 2017

Friday, 1 December 2017

Phantom App Updates in the iOS App Store ★

Jeff Johnson:

Starting on November 17, many iOS and tvOS apps that had not been updated for a year or two years suddenly received phantom updates in the App Store, without any action by the developers of those apps. The version numbers of the apps did not change. For some of the updates, the release notes were the same as the previous update. For others, the release notes said, “This update is signed with Apple’s latest signing certificate. No new features are included.” Some people speculated that Bitcode recompilation was performed on the apps. So far, Apple has not published any press release or documentation explaining why it updated all of these apps.

Vesper is one of the apps affected by this. If you’re seeing a Vesper update, it’s not because it’s actually updated. Sorry for any confusion, but we had nothing to do with this.

The Talk Show: ‘Disgusting Inception’ ★

John “With an H” Moltz returns to the show. Topics include the ongoing deluge of sexual harassment scandals, our beloved SodaStreams, the Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra root login fiasco, App: The Human Story, and more.

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