Hey @jonabechtolt, welcome! Thanks so much for giving this a test run. I totally, totally, understand your concerns. Before developing this app, I had this Allow Apps to Request to Track
setting permanently switched off (like 96% of users do as you’ve described), and had never even looked at that prior to this work.
We’ve actually updated the language described here to better describe the situation and feel less “icky” - users can specifically enable permissions for Resonate without toggling on the entire Allow Apps to Request to Track
setting. Here’s how it looks now, and everyone, please, if anyone has ideas for how to better describe this I’m more than happy to change the text on this page:
Just to provide more context and to add to what @boopboop has said above, this is the issue being addressed with this feature: Apple devices on iOS 14+ are required to ask users for this permission in this context because this app uses cookies for authentication and localstorage for remembering user logins and device theme preferences. However, even though there is a Cookie disclaimer when loading up the website for the first time (which you can still decline/configure), this wasn’t enough to satisfy Apple and allow us to publish the app on the Apple App Store. There are many kinds of cookies, some “good”, some “bad” (which is why FireFox’s Facebook Container is so great, for example), and Apple does not differentiate between them in this context.
Thus, users will see this screen unless they allow permissions (which is why it says Disallowing tracking permissions precludes the use of this app
). Again, I attempted to summarize this situation in the second paragraph, but if there’s any way to improve what’s being said and explain better, I’m all ears! Since users can in fact decline/configure cookies after allowing the app permissions from the top level, maybe there is a better way to say explain this so users aren’t as alarmed.
Apple should approve our latest release sometime today, so this updated language should be live and available on TestFlight before the end of the day.
^ post I accidentally deleted above, reposting here for transparency.
Circling back to this important point raised by @jonabechtolt: I believe I may have worked out a solution to the Tracking settings situation. I’ll leave the technical jargon out, but I was able to put together a small component that allows a user’s Tracking preferences to be honored by the stream repository. We unfortunately won’t know whether or not it satisfies Apple’s criteria for sure until they approve the new build for use in their App Store. I will keep this thread up to date when I hear back.
Also, here are some other exciting updates and additions that I was able to implement as I was digging into the above issue that are helping things feel more “app-like”:
- Forward and back gestures are now functional for navigation and behaving as expected. This makes it easier, for example, if a user navigates to the forum by clicking
Join in on the discussion
after clicking a tag, they can get back to the player easily. It also seems to make navigation less clunky in general because before your only option was pressing the Resonate logo in the top left to go back to the home page to get out of whatever artist/playlist/tag etc you were on. - Pulling down on a page, if you’re at the top, reloads it.
These two features are pretty much standard among modern apps, so I’m very excited to get all of this out for testing ASAP. Keep in mind that every new build that is submitted has to go through the process of being reviewed and approved by Google/Apple, so I appreciate everyone’s patience on this!