Apple says excessive iOS 16 copy and paste prompts are a bug

Following complaints from iOS 16 users that they are being repeatedly prompted to allow pasting from the same apps, an Apple executive says the company will "get to the bottom of it."

One of the privacy features added in iOS 16 was a prompt that means apps have to have user permission before they can use anything that may be on the clipboard. If a user copies anything and tries to paste it into an app, that app has to ask permission to receive it.

However, multiple users of iOS 16 — including some AppleInsider staff — have seen the same apps asking for permission over and over again. Anecdotally, the number of paste permission requests appears to have reduced over the beta period, but Apple has now responded to the issue.

"This is absolutely not expected behavior," Apple senior manager Ron Huang said in an email thread seen by MacRumors, "and we will get to the bottom of it."

Huang co-invented the feature and reportedly added that Apple has not seen this issue internally. He did say that more than one external user has reported it.

Plus, Huang said a suggestion to add per-app clipboard access in Settings was a "good improvement."

"[Apple certainly needs] to fix and make apps like Mail just work even without this setting," he continued. "[But the feature is] nonetheless helpful for apps which users want to share data with even if they didn't initiate it."

Huang concluded his comments with, "Stay tuned."

The copy and paste issue is not the only small, but annoying problem users have experienced since iOS 16 was released. Currently, Lock Screen widgets from third-party apps may not always appear as available to install, although there is a workaround.