Since the release of iOS 16, many iPhone users have been seeing an annoying behavior where the system displays a clipboard paste prompt – almost – every time the user tries to paste text from another app.
In one Answer to a MacRumors reader who shared his frustration with Apple SVP Craig Federighi via email, Apple executive Ron Huang confirms that the behavior is indeed a bug. The operating system should not ask users for permission to paste when they explicitly select the Paste action from the Cut/Copy/Paste menu. An explicit user action is intended to indicate intent, not require granting clipboard permission. If this works correctly, the number of permission prompts users see would be greatly reduced, since the confirmation message would only appear when the app attempts to read clipboard contents without user interaction, which could potentially be done maliciously.
iOS 16 clipboard: Apple is already investigating the problem
However, no timeline was announced for when users can expect a fix for the bug, which causes the alert to appear much more frequently than it should. Huang said that this behavior hasn't occurred internally at Apple yet and that "we're going to get to the bottom of it," so it doesn't sound like the cause of the problem has been fully identified yet.
Separately, the email expressed a desire to see clipboard access permissions added to the Settings -> Privacy panel so that apps that really want to access the clipboard can do so permanently without having to display a permission dialog each time. Huang said that this suggestion was a "good improvement" but stopped short of committing to it being implemented. (Photo by Engdao / Bigstockphoto)
