Totally agree there would be problems to solve with 3rd party applications changing their icons. I was actually thinking Apple could do something smart about the intervals that the icons are allowed to change.
For example, the icon has free reign to update itself when the application is active. This would be useful for things like Newsstand, where the user purchasing new items affects the icon. But wouldn't need to be abused since the icon can't be seen while the application is active, so no one is going to blink it.
Then you could allow applications to update at a constrained interval when they aren't active as well. Except what if the amount of time required for the icon to update itself determined how often it happened. So an icon like "Clock" literally takes the tiniest sliver of time to update would be allowed to update more freely. (Clock is a bad example since even that is excessive, but you get the idea.)
Whereas an icon that needed to make an HTTP request to get new information to update itself would take 100's of milliseconds, and thus would be rate limited to only update maybe once an hour at most.
No idea if it could work technically, but it seems like an interesting solution.
There are security issues with letting 3rd party apps change their icons. What if one changed itself to look like Facebook, then pretended to be Facebook and asked you to login?
For example, the icon has free reign to update itself when the application is active. This would be useful for things like Newsstand, where the user purchasing new items affects the icon. But wouldn't need to be abused since the icon can't be seen while the application is active, so no one is going to blink it.
Then you could allow applications to update at a constrained interval when they aren't active as well. Except what if the amount of time required for the icon to update itself determined how often it happened. So an icon like "Clock" literally takes the tiniest sliver of time to update would be allowed to update more freely. (Clock is a bad example since even that is excessive, but you get the idea.)
Whereas an icon that needed to make an HTTP request to get new information to update itself would take 100's of milliseconds, and thus would be rate limited to only update maybe once an hour at most.
No idea if it could work technically, but it seems like an interesting solution.