A good quality quartz crystal is accurate to about 15 seconds a month. Even the cheap ones can manage 30 seconds a month.
It is one of our biggest complaints about the "new" Apple.
There is no option for the user to disable the nonstop phoning home. iOS is a BSD-like OS configured so that the user does not fully control it (e.g. can't stop someone else's software from incessantly trying to phone home). The user cannot fully configure it (e.g., can't access HOSTS file). Only Apple can (they get root and they do not even own the device). Important settings are placed off limits to the owners of these devices. This is no fun.
Turn on an iOS device and it will keep trying to connect to Apple servers; it will not stop. An incredible tracking device if those servers keep logs, irrespective of Apple's reasoning. Not to mention lots of unnecessary network chatter on the home network.
Clarification: After many years of desensitization to this practice since the first iPhone, it is neither "a secret" nor "scandalous", but it is still disappointing. Moreover, I am not advocating any other mobile OS simply by making a comment about iOS. In fact, none of the "smartphones" being sold today are satisfactory to me as portable computers when compared with the control I get using an open source OS with i386, amd64 or even a development board.
I am seriously disappointed in this level of discourse. If you want anyone to take you seriously, you'll stop pulling shit like that in the future.
Shame on you.
> Don't act like you're scandalized about discovering the big secret that Apple won't let you fully control your iPhone in 2017.
I really feel a dissonance between Apple's marketing position with privacy and the behavior of their devices in the background.
Oh come on. You act like this is some malicious or unexpected new behavior when this is how Apple has behaved for at least 15 years now. And if the BSD guys didn't want their software used in that fashion, they'd change their license. But since BSD wrote their own license that allows for that, they explicitly approve of it.
Don't act like you're scandalized about discovering the big secret that Apple won't let you fully control your iPhone in 2017.
No, I'm pretty GP "acts like"
> After many years of desensitization to this practice since the first iPhone, it is neither "a secret" nor "scandalous"
I've never really understood the absurd (but common!) argument that a repugnant state of affairs isn't worth discussion if it isn't new. Usually, the heckler even agrees with the person they're heckling! What's the goal? Sabotage of a cause one agrees with merely to redeem hipster / cynic points? I don't get it.
It's disappointing that GP felt the need to preemptively address this possibility in their post, but it's downright silly that parent didn't even let this fact stop them. So it goes.
If you set your iOS device to auto-update overnight, that will typically happen between 3am and 5am. They even tell you that when they set the schedule.
I am getting a huge database of these logs because of my users. Maybe someone can help me investigate because there is definitely something going on.
Here is a preview: https://stan.sh/images/log-example.png
Don’t have all this data? Then maybe don’t jump to premature conclusions about what your network activity is telling you.
Here is a quick CSV export of all the concerned hosts (subdomain + domain) I could pick from my database.
https://stan.sh/images/ios_domains.csv
I really want the story behind pancake.g.aaplimg.com
mesu, su: software update
pancake: looks like home sharing? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26900625/what-is-pancake...
phobos, mzstatic: App/iTunes store, possibly also Apple Music
apptrailers: App Store app demo videos?
streamingaudio: Apple Music?
iphonesubmissions, radarsubmissions: crash report upload
guzzoni: Siri
appldwnld: firmware downloads
gs: firmware signature generator/verifier
albert: device activation
ckdatabase, ckdevice: CloudKit, like iCloud 2.0
keyvalueservice: old iCloud sync service, still used with text shortcuts sync
fmf: Find My Friends
fmip: Find My iPhone
All in all just looks normal, there's a lot of features in iOS/macOS/iTunes etc etc and they all have their own respective hostnames, possibly many for old school random-hostname-based load balancing, etc. Seems pretty normal that your users would be downloading apps (or the phone downloading updates automatically), playing Apple Music, updating iOS, etc. Spammy, but not that big a deal. I'd imagine rather similar from Android by filtering to Google, Samsung, etc hosts.
If you think there is an issue, instead of breathlessly declaring you’ve discovered a disturbing pattern in a system you couldn’t possibly have an informed perspective on, the correct way to handle it is to file a radar at https://bugreport.apple.com/ then come back here tell us your radar number so we can dupe it and add any of our own data that might help with the (perceived, in this case, I would say) issue.
Also, some iOS specific requests happen when there is no other DNS activity at all.
That seems very reasonable. It would be better than hardcoding IP addresses and safer than straight DNS for management things. Maybe their implementation of that doesn't have a very long TTL?
Also some of the activity can be related to measures that actually save power. For example, before attempting to do a heavy download of data provided by apps that implement background data downloading, it makes sense to first check the quality of the network connection.
I’d suggest everyone just chill and realize there can be good reasons for things, not just bad reasons. And consider the possibility that Apple is not stupid when it comes to power management.
