Dear Aunt TUAW: Limiting distribution to faster iPods and iPhones

@agrippa (TUAW won't let me reply to my own post apparently):

Sure here's a couple of links explaining the issue:
http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=4935
http://www.taranfx.com/blog/iphone-privacy-is-your-iphone-spying-on-you-how-to-fix-it

Main site which has also a list of apps:
http://i-phone-home.blogspot.com/

Surely you can limit distribution to the 3GS and above by only compiling for armv7 instead of universal using the option in Xcode?

Older iPhones/iPods used armv6.

You actually can get the cpu speed using a c function based on sysctl. It works perfectly on the iPhone. I use it in my application, Gauge Mathematical Tool, for publishing benchmark scores to a score server along with cpu clock speed.

Here's the function:
#import
#import
(import these headers if you need to.)

int getProcessorFrequency()
{
int count ;
size_t size=sizeof(count) ;

if (sysctlbyname("hw.cpufrequency",&count,&size,NULL,0)) return 1;

return count;

}

The return value will be the cpu clock speed in hz. 600 mHz would be something like 600000000.

You can also get the ram size, like this:

int getRamSize()
{
int count ;
size_t size=sizeof(count) ;

if (sysctlbyname("hw.memsize",&count,&size,NULL,0)) return 1;

return count;
}

The return value will be in bytes.


One more function is useful, and it allows you to get the hardware model id of your device (i.e. iPhone2,1 or iPod3,1)

- (NSString *)hardwareModel
{
static NSString *hardwareModel = nil;
if (!hardwareModel) {
char buffer[128];
size_t length = sizeof(buffer);
if (sysctlbyname("hw.model", &buffer, &length, NULL, 0) == 0) {
hardwareModel = [[NSString allocWithZone:NULL] initWithCString:buffer encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding];
}
if (!hardwareModel || [hardwareModel length] == 0) {
hardwareModel = @"Unknown";
}
}
return hardwareModel;
}

Hope that this helps you.

Erica, if you're adding Radar bugs that aren't sensitive, you might also want to add them to the (still under-utilized) OpenRadar -- http://openradar.appspot.com/

Since Radar is only accessible to Apple folks, OpenRadar maintains a sort of mirror of bugs that have been made publicly available. You can even map the rdar: URL to OpenRadar, so that clicking on one of the ever-popular rdar:// URLs on an Apple mailing list will immediately direct you to OpenRadar to check if there's a public mirror of the bug.

If you put pinch media or other data collecting libraries in your app, I and many others will not purchase it. There are websites that list apps that embed this 'spyware' and this gives people a choice to not have their data network used and device (and therefore you personally) identifying data sent to 3rd party servers without their consent or knowledge.

or you could be less lazy and optimize your code so you dont need all that processing power. I know its hard to put effort and not use off the shelf API calls and call it a day so you can make a quick buck, but in the long run it'll give you more credibility as a publisher and allow you to reach a greater user base.

yeah I recently ran into this , when a user downloaded my app. The app only works on 2nd gen devices and we state that in the app store description too. But it would have been nice if the user could have just been cut off before the sale.