Apple's iOS 18 Privacy Changes May_hit_Social Apps Hard

TapTechNews October 3rd news, The New York Times released a blog post yesterday (October 2nd), reporting that the privacy changes in Apple's iOS 18 system may pose a 'catastrophic' blow to social applications.

iOS 18 refines contact permissions

Apple has further refined the permission management in the iOS 18 system, clarifying how applications obtain users' contact permissions.

Previously, for applications like Instagram or WhatsApp that request access to your contacts, users could only choose to authorize or deny, with no other options.

TapTechNews note: In the iOS 18 system, Apple has further refined the contact permissions. If an application requests access to your contacts after the update, you can accurately choose the contacts you are willing to share.

Apple believes this change helps user privacy and avoids the 'all or nothing' choice users face when sharing contacts.

Impact on social applications

For social applications that rely on contact sharing, this change has raised concerns among some application developers, believing it will affect their rapid growth and competitiveness.

Social applications need to quickly connect new users with friends to improve user retention rates, for example, Facebook found early that the number of friends added by users is related to the retention rate.

Some startup companies' reports show that since the implementation of iOS 18, contact sharing has significantly decreased, and the number of users sharing 10 or fewer contacts has increased by 25%.

Developers point out that the changes in iOS 18 do not apply to Apple's own services (such as iMessage), considering it a kind of anti-competitive behavior.

With the reduction of contact sharing, friend-based social applications may be replaced by content-oriented applications (such as TikTok).