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joshribakoff • today at 3:21 AM • 0 replies • view on HN

From the perspective of the simple dialog, its a problem with the consumer app who calls the api to open the dialogue without context, without informing the user or obtaining user consent prior to doing so. Plenty of apps get this right, eg. Have a screen with buttons in the on-boarding flow that opens the dialogue next to the “maybe later” option, and use that page to explain or “sell” the benefits of enabling the permission.

Maybe the dialogs api should be treated like autoplaying videos with sound on the web, just disable the api if it is called outside of a click event handler, and let the consumer app break. That would be a breaking change for OSs tho. It wouldn’t prevent malicious UI patterns from triggering annoying permission prompts, but it would minimize accidental bad ux eg calling it in the main method on load