My app wants to connect to devices!!

Jassim Al Rahma 1,526

Hi,

Why my app wants to connect to devices on the local network as you can see in the below screenshot? and how can I disable this?

1 answer

Wenyan Zhang (Shanghai Wicresoft Co,.Ltd.) 26,416 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2021-10-27T03:16:59.513+00:00
Hello,

Welcome to our Microsoft Q&A platform!

This alert means that your app has triggered the Local Network Privacy. Apple adds a privacy setting related to local network usage in iOS 14.0, this alert can't be removed if your app do some operations required local network access. If you want to disable it, I 'm afraid you have to remove all operations about local network. It may not be used in your code, however, it will be used in some third-party tools.
In addition, your app needs to obtain the Privacy - Local Network Usage Description permission from the user to access the user's local network device, the default prompt is displayed as you provided, you could modify the description according to your business requirements. You could Open the info.plist in your iOS project, and add the following key

<key>NSLocalNetworkUsageDescription</key> <string>xxxxxxxxxx</string>

For more information, you could refer to
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63525026/what-triggers-the-would-like-to-find-and-connect-to-devices-on-your-local-netwo
Best Regards,
Wenyan Zhang

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Jassim Al Rahma 1,526 Reputation points

2021-10-27T10:50:20.853+00:00

Thanks..

But what kind of local operation you are talking about here?

I don't think I am connecting to any local because my app requires WiFi / Internet connection as my data are all on remote server.

Wenyan Zhang (Shanghai Wicresoft Co,.Ltd.) 26,416 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2021-10-28T09:24:20.15+00:00

Network framework, BSD Sockets, NSStream, NSURLSession and WKWebView and some other lowest levels of networking APIs. You could check these common scenarios
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/663874

" Local network privacy provides added transparency when apps connect to devices on a person's home network. If your app interacts with devices using Bonjour or other local networking protocols, you must add support for local network privacy permissions in iOS 14 " , it is Apple's privacy policy and the explanation.
In addition, there is no such an API to check the access granted or not, this is related to Apple.

Jassim Al Rahma 1,526 Reputation points

2021-10-28T09:50:13.74+00:00

but the first in the link is:

Making an outgoing TCP connection — yes

Does this mean any app which does HttpClient will get that message?

** I don't have any Bonjour

Wenyan Zhang (Shanghai Wicresoft Co,.Ltd.) 26,416 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2021-10-29T06:14:31.21+00:00

No, if you just use HttpClient to send http requests to your web server, you will not get the message. It means the direct unicast or multicast connections to local hosts, such as remote access to the desktop, screen casting and so on.

Sometimes, this alert will appear as long as the accessed server and the wifi connected to the device are on the same intranet. This kind of situation usually occurs during the internal test phase, it does not need to be dealt with. The alert will no longer appear when the server is deployed to the public network, and the permission is not used in fact. Sometimes, this alert also appear when you use the API to detect wifi.

If you are sure that you haven't used the local network, you could check the third-party tools. As far as I know, some SDKs include local network functions.

Jassim Al Rahma 1,526 Reputation points

2021-10-29T12:12:54.44+00:00

This is my info.plist

Wenyan Zhang (Shanghai Wicresoft Co,.Ltd.) 26,416 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2021-11-01T02:32:34.61+00:00

I can't determine whether you used the local net or not form this info.plist file, you have to check the function of your app. if you don't known which method involves the local network and you don't want to remove the Local Network Privacy prompt, you could add this NSLocalNetworkUsageDescription key into your info.plist.
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