The developer of an iOS application for Nissan thoughtlessly copied the code from Stack Overflow directly into production

Blogger Scott Helm shared a curious screenshot with the readers of his twitter that contains the geolocation settings screen of the NissanConnect mobile app (link to the original tweet that takes up too much space in Geektimes). At first glance, the application looks quite ordinary, if not for the curious line "The spirit of stack overflow is coders helping coders" at the bottom.

Despite the fact that the phrase looks quite benevolent, it is still difficult to assume that the developer inserted it on purpose. A quick search on StackOverflow confirms this thought: someone with the nickname spenf10 in August last year asked a question that was directly related to the topic of geolocation on iOS. The answer, which scored 106 votes, contains an example of XML code to fill in the info.plist file:

<key>NSLocationWhenInUseUsageDescription</key> <string>The spirit of stack overflow is coders helping coders</string> <key>NSLocationAlwaysUsageDescription</key> <string>I have learned more on stack overflow than anything else</string> 

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Apparently, the author of NissanConnect simply copied the code into your application, without properly editing the parameter description string. This, of course, did not affect the performance of the application, which was officially presented to users.