iOS 16 introduced a new privacy feature that requires apps to receive a user’s permission before accessing their iPhone’s clipboard to paste text from other apps, but some users experienced an issue that caused the prompt to appear excessively. Apple released iOS 16.0.2 with a fix for the issue and other bugs in late September.
Apple has continued to refine the copy-and-paste permission feature in the weeks since. In the Settings app on the fourth beta of iOS 16.1 and later, a new “Paste from Other Apps” menu appears for apps that have previously asked for permission to paste content from another app. The menu presents users with three options: Ask, Deny, and Allow.
- Ask: The app must continue to request permission to paste content from other apps.
- Deny: The app cannot paste content from other apps.
- Allow: The app can paste content from other apps without asking for permission again.
The menu does not appear for apps that have never requested clipboard permission.
It’s not entirely clear how iOS determines when to show a copy-and-paste permission prompt in the first place. In our own testing, the prompt often does not appear when pasting text between apps, even though the iOS 16 features page explicitly says “apps need your permission before accessing the pasteboard to paste content from another app.”
Nevertheless, the menu gives users more granular control over the copy-and-paste permission prompts, which should help make the feature less of a nuisance.
(Thanks, Youssef Salem!)Related Roundups: iOS 16, iPadOS 16Related Forum: iOS 16
This article, “iOS 16.1 Introduces New Copy-and-Paste Permission Settings on Per-App Basis” first appeared on MacRumors.com
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