T-Mobile's you absolutely can disable, but I would have never ever thought to look there until I read this.
I switched off Auto-join on both "t-mobile" and "TMobileWingman", but I couldn't hit the "Done" text-but-its-really-a-button in the upper right until I made some change to the normal known networks list, so I deleted a couple that I didn't remember or recognize. YMMV.
It's gross either way. No way, no way in hell this is something that should be shadow dropped onto my phone.
This is insane. I have never heard of these and after checking I also have them on my iDevice. Tmobile should explain what wingman is and why it's on IOS devices.
I don't understand why Apple allows carriers to do this. Apple id a well-respected brand by most of their customers while carriers are seen as an evil you cannot do without.
I suppose "brand perception" loses to "we bought all the RF spectrum". If T-mobile, AT&T, and Verizon say "no iPhone", guess who is out of business? Not the spectrum owners.
> If T-mobile, AT&T, and Verizon say "no iPhone", guess who is out of business?
If Apple said, "no, you can't force users onto Wi-Fi networks without their consent," T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon would just say, "ok, it was worth a try," and carry on as if nothing happened. People will still want Apple products in sufficient numbers, and carriers will still want money from those people. But Apple isn't interested in what people want, Apple is interested in what they can convince people they want.
If my cellular provider stopped supporting iPhones as a first class device I would switch providers by the end of the billing period, no question.
AT&T got my business by supporting the iPhone first. I assume if one major carrier drops the iPhone the other would recognize the opportunity and court users asap.
I mean I’m certainly not switching back to a dumb phone or android. And since iOS maintains 56% market share in the US Apple can easily force some hands.
I count that as a plus. If the scanning is done on my device, they have zero reasons to scan the content in the cloud and thus can encrypt it at rest so nobody can access it even with a warrant.
But I've had this same argument a thousand times and it's like shouting at the tide and trying to stop it...
The reason you are likely wrong here is because it's an ownership boundary - the cloud service is understood to be renting, but you purchased the phone and own it.
What you are suggesting doesn't necessarily make zero sense to desire, but practically speaking I don't think it makes sense based on the transactions that have occurred in this scenario. They may have a right to do that stuff on the cloud, but they don't have a right to do it on your device. It has nothing to do with which is better.
...but they didn't scan anything unless you were uploading images to the cloud anyway.
Disable cloud upload -> no local scanning.
People were stumbling over each other in one of the biggest competitive misunderstanding contests of the 2020's and Apple backed down to shut people up just because nobody bothered to RTFM and just got angry based on random internet hot-takes that were based on incorrect assumptions.
Their plan was to scan stuff that would be sent to their hardware on your hardware so that they could encrypt it on their hardware without having the key themselves. And law enforcement wouldn't have had the "what about child pornography" -angle to force access to data, since everything would've been pre-scanned.
If no data would've been sent to their hardware, no scanning would've happened.
It wasn't a complex idea, but The Internet decided collectively to misunderstand it.
Not respecting or trusting Apple is a valid position to have. Not sure why people would down vote this.
It's clear that Apple uses the feelings of trust and respect in their marketing campaigns, but this is just a calculated strategy that works for them. As a company, they are like most companies - they desire to create and maximize revenue streams. To the extent that they value trust and respect they actually value customer perceived trust and respect as it relates to their marketing strategies.
Tl;Dr if they think they can get away with things that are customer hostile without tarnishing their marketing image they'll do it. They will take calculated risks here as well.
Apple forces a 30% fees on subscriptions, negotiates with Uber (and presumably others) to pass this cost directly onto the user in cases where the margin is so low the 3rd party cannot economically eat the fee: https://www.techemails.com/p/lets-take-a-cut-of-membership-p...
iMessage is exclusive to iPhone because they fear that parents may buy Android for their children over iPhones if the app was available on both - which obviously indicates that the dark UX treatment of non iMessage sms (green bubbles) is an intentional segmentation of the messaging ecosystem designed to bring users to the iphone thru social effects. Any platitudes to security are purely marketing. https://www.techemails.com/p/imessage-for-android
Apple is a company, their users are revenue streams, trust and respect matter in terms perspective not in terms of meaningful action. They will do things that put their trust/respect at calculated risks to maximize revenue.
Folks thinking otherwise are pleasantly naive - it is totally reasonable to question Apple's actions and motivations.
Apple
End Users
Distribution partners
Other companies
Once you realize that then their decisions make sense. And for me these priorities aren't the worst thing ever. Yes, Apple putting Apple first means I pay a premium.
(And BTW, to clarify: Apple has a book store monopoly on iOS, not "a monopoly on iOS for books". I can read my Kindle books perfectly fine)
You can read books from Amazon/Kindle on iOS because Apple lost an antitrust price fixing case in US federal court and paid nearly half a billion in damages.
Apple conspired with publishing houses to shut Amazon out of the market through leveraging it's huge device platform. Steve Jobs literally said: "The price will be the same... Publishers are actually withholding their books from Amazon because they are not happy."
If Apple had won their case it is a serious question if you would have Kindle books to read.
Maybe Apple doesn't know carriers are doing this and the capability is an oversight? Verizon and AT&T seem to be respecting the user auto-join preference flag.
I'm thinking Apple didn't expect the carrier to do this.
I have T-mobile but I haven't a clue what you are talking about. There are Wi-Fi networks called "t-mobile" and "TMobileWingman"? I just don't see them at all. Under what condition should I see them?
Settings/Wifi/edit/scroll down to “managed networks”
These are networks added by your carrier you can’t remove. They have equal priority to your real networks.
In my case, 2 neighbors have freebie wifi/modem combos blasting out 1-bar hotspots that match my carriers free hotspot SSIDs, so all my family’s personal devices constantly switch between my real home network and these “hot spots” with no way to stop it short of removing everyone’s SIMs
You'd need an extremely strong reality distortion field to advocate for it. I can only guess it's a way for the telcos to offload 5g traffic.
In the Android world, if Samsung/Telstra introduced something similar in Australia that'd be enough for me to jump ship to another manufacturer that didn't. There's an auto-enabled "Hotspot 2.0" feature that I've turned off; it's not ideal that it's on by default but for people on lesser data plans it could be convenient. It's a simple toggle to turn off, nothing's forced.
How does this offload traffic? That wifi router is likely a 5G home internet router which is connecting to the same tower. So while connected clients would reduce, bandwidth usage would not as these devices are not powerful enough to run any meaningful caching services.
I could see a system where carriers partner with cities to install wifi at crowded locations, preset a carrier provided password and use that for better service than 5g.
But I am shocked that they would force connection to open ssids.
In my case I disable auto join on all and they’re all back on in 4-5 minutes.
I was also able to verify this as the device will still really connect to the “disabled” hot spots, even after switching it off. Just took a while for the profile to resync.
Edit: only 5 of 9 re-enable auto join after I disable it.
looks like a few of mine resynced and toggled auto join. My iPad has none of these managed network entities at all, seems to be a phone thing only.
Looks like comcast xfinity type networks are being imposed too. The xfinity App may be toggling these XFI, Xfinity Mobile, xfinitywifi pieces your way too.
The Xfinity ones show up only after you install a profile from the Xfinity app or website, and manually enable it in Settings.
The Xfinity hotspot service typically has two SSIDs going: "xfinitywifi", which is unencrypted and has a captive portal to log in, and the "XFINITY" network, which the installing the profile enables access to and which is encrypted with 802.1X authentication.
For everyone except apparently the carriers, Apple is very strict about the opt in nature of managed WiFi networks.
I have devices with 0 Comcast apps and 0 profiles but they all have the Xfinity managed networks, the only thing they have in common is the cellular service.
It's been more than five minutes, I opened the menu again and it's still disabled. I'm on an iPhone 12 Pro Max on iOS 16.4, which is the latest iOS.
> even after switching it off
This might be your issue, because after a restart your iPhone no longer has access to your saved Wi-Fi credentials, but it can still use EAP-SIM to join T-Mobile's Wi-Fi network first. But I see your point that it does not respect the "Auto-join" toggle.
If this happens often enough to annoy you, you could file this bug with Apple by typing "applefeedback:///" into Safari. It could take some guesswork to figure out what component to file this against.
Does Apple ever respond to bug reports? I've only ever heard of them disappearing into the void. Beyond that though, users shouldn't have to file bugs against hostile features like this. Spreading the word as widely as possible about Apple's behavior here is likely to be far more effective.
Apparently they don't normally respond to them directly but they do look at/analyze them. Once in a blue moon you'll hear about someone getting contacted by an Apple engineer for more information.
I do not have that section under Settings/WiFi. Does that mean tht my carrier simply has not added any managed networks, or should this section always be there, even if it is empty? Or is this a US thing, as I am in Germany?
It doesn't stay off for me either, but after some digging on the internet, Wingman appears to be an in-flight wifi network on planes (which may not actually exist anymore and T-Mobile are in the process of removing from devices according to this recent comment by a stranger on an old Reddit thread[1]). While it's annoying that it doesn't stay off, it doesn't seem to be something that would cause problems in practice because flights typically only have one wifi network.
I switched off Auto-join on both "t-mobile" and "TMobileWingman", but I couldn't hit the "Done" text-but-its-really-a-button in the upper right until I made some change to the normal known networks list, so I deleted a couple that I didn't remember or recognize. YMMV.
It's gross either way. No way, no way in hell this is something that should be shadow dropped onto my phone.