Today, Apple released my Update 9.02.03 which will bring back the MAC Addresses and fixes the Crash in the Device Tool reported by some users.
MAC Addresses
Bringing back the MAC Addresses was really a challenge and caused me some more gray hair and long nights during the last days. With iOS 10.2 Apple continued with their good intentions to protect our privacy by removing all sorts of information that might be misused by developers to uniquely identifying our devices. Apples approach is a good approach and I appreciate that in general. However, this has caused that I was no longer able to show the MAC Addresses in Network Scans anymore which was quite unfortunate as the MAC Addresses were also used along with the included MAC Database to show the vendor of each device. Finding a solution was really a challenge as I have to use official APIs because otherwise Apple would have rejected the App. The solution I found is indeed using official Apple APIs but in a very specific and unusual way (don’t want to elaborate more). This said, I expect Apple to even close this door at some point.
Device Tool crash
This was also a challenge. Some user reported the Device Tool to crash (one user even left a one-star bad review only because of this crash). I tried to reproduce this on any of my various test devices without success. Fortunately, some users contacted me regarding this crash (Thanks again!) and I asked those users to enable crash-log submission in iOS (Settings -> Privacy -> Diagnostics & Usage -> Automatically Send, then enable “Share With App Developers”). When switched on, Crash logs will be submitted to Apple and a few days (sometimes a week) later I am able to download anonymized logs from Apple. These logs showed that indeed for a few users, the App crashed for security reasons as it wasn’t allowed to access motion sensor data (Motion data will be accessed in the Device Tool for the Sensor section). The question is still, why only a few users were affected and why I was (and I am still not) able to reproduce this on all of my test devices. However, I hope at least I fixed this in the new version 9.2.3. If not, please let me know.
Holidays
Thank you so much for all your reviews. It was overwhelming to read them all. Unfortunately they are now gone with this update but I don’t want to bother you again asking to update your review.
Instead, please have relaxing and secure Holidays.
Thank you all and let’s work together for a more secure 2017!
See you in 2017.
Best regards – and don’t trust the evil.
Marcus