Progress
Day #4 of building AppTruth in public
One of the most sensitive moments in AppTruth isn’t the scan. It’s asking someone to connect their repository. A codebase contains the product you’ve spent weeks or months building. Even when a developer tool promises to help, granting access is always the most action that requires the most trust from the app. That creates a product-design question I’ve been thinking about: What is the minimum access AppTruth actually needs? The answer should always be read-only GitHub repo access. AppTruth needs to understand how an app’s features work, but it doesn’t need permission to push changes into the repository. The results can provide context and AI-ready fix prompts while leaving the decision (and the actual edit) with the users. The tradeoff here is automatically applying a fix might remove a step, but it would also require a much larger level of trust. For a product designed to uncover behavior you didn’t expect, asking for more control than necessary would feel wrong. The broader lesson I’m taking from this is that permissions are part of the user experience. Every permission request should have a clear answer to 3 questions: 1. Why is this needed? 2. What can the product do with it? 3. Could the same value be delivered with less access? What information would you need before feeling comfortable connecting a private repository to a developer tool?
By Uriel Bitton