Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge
Some people have been experiencing a frustrating issue in iOS 16 that causes a “do you want to allow this?” dialog box to appear every single time they attempt to copy and paste anything. Now, as noted by MacRumors, Apple has chimed in to confirm that this is not what the company intended with its new stricter clipboard privacy measures.
Ron Huang, a senior engineer at the company, responded to a customer complaint about the issue that was originally emailed to CEO Tim Cook and software chief Craig Federighi. “This is absolutely not expected behavior, and we will get to the bottom of it,” Huang wrote in response.
Apparently, Apple hadn’t encountered this behavior internally before iOS 16 shipped early last week. The bug seems to predominantly affect the brand-new iPhone 14 lineup. In my case, setting up an iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro Max as new without restoring a backup has successfully reproduced the unrelenting paste prompt both times. So there you go, Apple QA team. Get after it and spare us from this nagging.
As MacRumors points out, Huang knows a thing or two about this feature: he’s listed among the inventors of it on Apple’s patent filing. When working properly, it sounds like the “allow” dialog is meant to be displayed when apps try to access pasteboard data without direct user involvement. But as the bug stands now, it’s conflicting with unmistakable user intent and the system’s core paste command.
Hopefully this is something that Apple can quickly patch — say, in iOS 16.0.2 — instead of making people wait for the more substantial iOS 16.1 release that’s unlikely to arrive for several more weeks.