Posted by _da_ 10 hours ago
> It has no tarot function, no horoscopes, and nothing that I, or anyone else I’ve asked, would associate with astrology.
I have dealt with the Byzantine App Store bureaucracy before. What you do here, is you submit a new version, pretty much identical to the previous one, with the comment “tarot function removed”.
App stores should not exist in a world where only two phone operating systems exist. All apps MUST be installable via web.
Come on, EU. Help us out here. Free us from distribution tyranny. Do it before Google morphs into the same hell beast.
Soon you won't be able to read unapproved, unattested bytes. It's coming. We need as many freedoms as we can get.
Apple can be a great company without the app store monopoly. So can Google.
"I do not see the conflict between the view that the App Store review system is failing and the view that it's not the government's business to intervene. Allowing failing systems to fail is how market forces work." https://mastodon.social/@gruber/117055639204173161
The App Store doesn't compete on its own merits because Apple actively prevents competition from letting it decide what the better system is.
If there are two producers each with ~50% market share, it's not profitable for one of them to improve their product such that they capture an additional 5% of the market but reduces the profit margin of their product by 10%. If there are 50 producers each with ~2% market share, one of them would happily capture 5% of the market (more than doubling the size of their business!) by sacrificing 10% of their profit margin.
In the Google-Apple duopoly it's much more profitable to engage in tacit collusion than it is to defect.
Necessity really is the mother of invention, and the more we need something new, the sooner someone will invent it. But it will look no more like an iPhone than the iPhone looked like a PC.
I actually suspected as much and left "competing smartphones" somewhat vague.
> When Windows seemed entrenched forever
It's still entrenched! Microsoft got a slap on the wrist by the government right before September 11, and antitrust enforcement has been on a holiday ever since.
> the platforms that eventually surpassed weren’t the competing desktop OSes (Mac and Linux)
In terms of revenue, desktop computers were surpassed by smartphones, but they were not replaced by smartphones. I don't consider them to be directly competing products, and most of us who can afford it own both. A smartphone fits in your pocket, whereas a keyboard and pointing device and large screen will never fit in your pocket.
2004 11%
2005 17%
2006 37%
2007 42%
2008 27%
2009 15%
2010 7%
2011 3%
I've been curious about the north korean mobile OS...
Since real people review apps, Apple should charge per app / version submission.
Poor Apple needs to ask for even more money to do their job?
Sure seems like they could find some other way.
None of what you say can explain that Apple reviewers falsely accuse an app of being astrology when absolutely nothing proves it and double down when shown they are wrong. Again, absolutely nothing there could be explained by an "exponential number of submissions" nor solved by charging developers (even more than they already do!).
Stop defending the indefensible.
Or they could let developers upload apps to another app store. Apple isn't reviewing them out of charity, they're doing it to enforce a monopoly where they get a 30% cut of every developer's income.
No can do, EU is busy mandating only Google/Apple devices for national digital ID.
> Soon you won't be able to read unapproved, unattested bytes. It's coming.
happy EU noises
I got rejected with a screenshot from an app that doesn’t have anything like the screenshot, it took me several rejections to realize someone reviewer watched some old YouTube video I submitted ages ago and didn’t like something that was fine before…. They have a login where they can see the first page , I gave it to them , but they chose to reject because of an old video.
I recently signed up for a personal dev account for the play store and I have to get 12 friends with android devices to “test” it before they’ll consider my app at all…
That is to say I have to go online and horse trade with 12 people (hell if I know who these people are or what their unapproved apps do…) and get them to test mine if I test theirs. That alone is suspicious kinda behavior but google all but requires it now.
Meanwhile on my work account I’m publishing just fine.
They don't want 100 apps that do the exact same thing.
I read it as the "insane" part parent is pointing at.
It's nothing new, has been going on basically since the existence of the App store and Apple has explicitly built their whole business to put themselves as the arbiter of who gets to have their app on people's phones.
Still it's healthy that from times to time we stop and shout "that whole situation is insane" (short of finding a way to actually do something about it)
You can still always get around them (at least my experience), but it just takes a lot of time
They are probably making a killing on people who forgot about or can't figure out how to cancel the $4.99/week subscription on the top 20-30 of these apps.
All this while of course the one app you've been working on for a year will be held up with multiple rounds of rejections weeks apart. For all the good Cook has done in his 15 years at Apple, the App Store will be the one real stain on his legacy, and I hope Ternus is as acutely cognizant of that as the developer community is.
Well, and the Apple Car. And the Butterfly Keyboard and that horrible i9 16" MBP. Plus the Airpower, and the Vision Pro, and he cancelled the entire Mac Pro lineup too. Also the $1,000 VESA monitor mount and goofy desktop wheels, and we should probably also mention his meetings with Donald Trump and eventual White House dinner with Bin Salman. Tim also failed to legally deter NSO Group, held a grudge against Nvidia during a $4 trillion ARM/CUDA datacenter boom, greenlit Liquid Glass, proposed Client-Side Scanning and fought dirty against organic and reasonable EU regulations.
But besides that, yes, the pitiful state of the App Store will be remembered as his true strategic slip-up.
(b) Don’t submit apps that are indistinguishable from what's already widely available. Opportunistically creating variants of existing app categories or popular apps degrades App Store discovery, reduces overall app quality, and harms both users and developers. Certain kinds of apps, such as dating, flashlight, sound effects, wallpaper, simple timers, and fortune telling, are well established on the App Store and we will not accept new submissions unless they offer a meaningfully different or improved experience. We may remove these apps from the App Store going forward if they are not updated, improved, or do not attract customers. Other kinds of apps, such as drinking games, Kama Sutra, fart, and burp apps, are mediocre, low-quality, or low-effort and do not add value to the App Store. Repeated submissions of this kind may lead to removal from the Apple Developer Program.
I submitted a timer app this year and it got approved. It's literally just a slightly more feature-rich timer.
I made this as a "my first app" type of experience. Never at any point was the quality of my app questioned, and I'm the first person who will tell you that it's not very good.
Which makes this a good time to remind everyone about the Keep Android Open movement:
> "Starting in 2027*, a silent update, nonconsensually pushed by Google, will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed over government ID."
In my opinion, the Apple app store should actually be FAR more curated than it is, and far less curated options should be equally available. The Apple App store (and the Google app store for that matter), should be a relatively small list of apps that have extremely high standards and guarantees. It should essentially be impossible for spammy bullshit to get into these places. User-controlled, parental control like options should determine whether or not other app sources can be installed from (including allowing for specific other sources, so that app source control can be granular and detailed. I should be allowed to add FDroid but nothing else for example).
Done. Problem solved. Everyone is happy. Grandma is safe and Johnny has control over his phone.
But of course, that assumes that keeping Granny safe is actually the reason. Facially obviously, it is not, and is in fact entirely pretextual.
1. The vast majority of people are Grandma, and they do not have a Johnny available to administer their tech. Most people are not technical.
2. The vast majority of Grandmas will follow instructions on a “how do I share cute photo” website even when that website directs them to dig deep into configuration settings and ignore six “are you sure you want to allow this app to fully remotely control your device?” warnings. Even if Grandma has a healthy suspicion of scams, when she is instead trying to accomplish a goal she will suddenly prove quite adept at giving software with questionable provenance root access to her life.
And then, billions of users cry out in pain as their private data is hoovered into the panopticon in the cloud.
Then it would be legal for someone to develop and give-away a patch for the Meta app...
That's not how data collection works? It's Apple's responsibility to prevent their application runtime from exposing private data or unnecessary entitlements. Enabling sideloading does not prevent Apple from protecting user data any more than the App Store does.
Or they accept the push notification dialog on some random site and start getting "COMPUTER HACKED, CALL MICROSOFT AT FAKE NUMBER" notifications that look like they come from the OS.
It would be foolproof, maybe the most trustworthy system ever conceived.
Last time I was in a bank branch they told me to go to the website for my issue.
And this sort of attitude is exactly what needs to change.
But what's Grandma supposed to do in the meantime?
> There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.
The same is true for computers. Solutions that "allow competent individuals" to do something are also typically solutions scammers can convince Grandma to perform without understanding what they do.
(Case in point: I saw a fake captcha that told you to open Terminal and paste a command to "prove" you're human; https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/1rq4bh6/warning_suspic...)
We don't have to make it trivially easy.
If you give a toddler a butcher's knife to play with and they get hurt, you'll likely get in trouble for child endangerment.
Using my car requires it be registered, pass my state's safety standards, and that I possess a valid license and follow a wide variety of rules.
Maybe a certain level of protection is, at times, acceptable?
Social engineering is the weakest link even if your grandma is doing all her banking on Windows XP.
No, not necessarily. Quite a few countries have restrictions on knives, including some parts of the US - a switchblade will get you in trouble in NYC.
> you can drive your own car
Only in approved ways!
Hell, you'll get in trouble if your gasoline is the wrong color.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_dye#Fuel_dye_in_North_Ame...
"Detection of red-dyed fuel in the fuel system of an on-road vehicle will incur substantial penalties."
> murderers will still murder and scammers will still scam
Do we not take steps to try and reduce murder?
You've missed my point even though it's right in front of you. You won't get in trouble for using your Apple device in non-approved ways because it doesn't let you. Would you ban cars for everyone because it's not safe for grandma to drive anymore? Probably not - so why lock down devices for everyone?
> Do we not take steps to try and reduce murder?
Not directly? Gun/knife control probably helps but people willing to risk the consequences of murder are not going to care about breaking more laws to get illegal weapons. Or just use a weapon that's easy to get.
The government won't let me use my car in non-approved ways. They will, in fact, stop me with guns at times.
I'm not even allowed to purchase some items, let alone use as I please. I'm allowed to buy (or sell) a https://www.fairphone.com/ style device! But no one really wants them.
Not relevant. Most people don't choose their phone/platform based on how much freedom it gives you. An iPhone is a very good phone overall but the restrictions are unfortunately bundled in.
You're obviously fine with it but it is only going to get worse in the future. The whole Android developer verification thing is a step in the same direction from Google's side. Eventually macOS will be locked down or even phased out - most young people just do everything on their phone now so why not? I don't want to accept that future so I'm not supporting platforms that restrict it.
Pro: I can use a convoluted process to install an astronomy app Apple didn't like.
Con: Billions of dollars of life savings siphoned off with devastating consequences.
I'm by no means a maximalist on either side of this, but technologists aren't the only ones who get a say here.
I agree with you on the risks of this sort of protection! But I understand what it’s like for non-technical folks in a technical society. Their needs do matter.
That the gatekeeper and government benefit from this arrangement is just a happy accident.
That’s the reality. As with most things in society, it’s left to people to negotiate the balance.
Developers are wondering if they are the only ones on their forums: https://developer.apple.com/forums/topics/app-store-distribu...
On the other hand I have a personal iOS app that normally doesn't take long to approve that's been waiting two weeks.
and i am surprised that apps like "Night Sky" (great app, no affiliation) made it past review if the app store reviewers are incapable of telling the difference.
https://darkhours.io/ does look really cool, i hope they get this sorted out.
> the App Review Board and the Review Board responded that they determined the original rejection was valid because, I shit you not, “We understand that the app includes a live tarot reading feature.”
So that's it, they need to remove the live tarot reading. Which to me while not being astrology, isn't much better.
>So that's it, they need to remove the live tarot reading.
dark hours doesnt have live tarot reading.
Further down he states there was never any tarot reading function. So how can he remove a function the app never had and thus a function the reviewer never could have seen?
> It has no tarot function, no horoscopes, and nothing that I, or anyone else I’ve asked, would associate with astrology.
We had a client whose website geoblocked non-US IPs and failed several rounds of review until we gave up and put a copy of their privacy policy on S3.