The words astro-nomy and astro-logy are similar, but this is no "fluke".

There's a Wikipedia article with some history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrology_and_astronomy

I imagine astronomers have been sighing resignedly at dinner parties for a couple of millenia:

In the Hellenistic world, the Greek words 'astrologia' and 'astronomia' were often used interchangeably, but they were conceptually not the same.

In his compilatory work Etymologiae [c. 625], Isidore of Seville noted explicitly the difference between the terms astronomy and astrology (Etymologiae, III, xxvii) and the same distinction appeared later in the texts of Arabian writers.

Is astrology not allowed in app store? That's kind of a weird thing to ban.

The arbitrariness of app store review hasn't been the greatest on the Google side, for me lately anyway. I got dinged for having an E-rating for my TV show info app that displays an official promo image for an episode of Landman, where a character has a wound with some blood on his face.

I pointed out that there were a couple other E-rated apps that show the exact same image, and many more T-rated ones that only warn of "In-App Purchases" — no "Violence" label. One of the latter is the official Google TV app [0], so I sent some screenshots of that, and asked if maybe they were "crushing the competition" by avoiding their own review process, to see if that would escalate my case (no such luck).

[0] The image is still the same in the Google TV app, and Google Search surfaces the image in question S1 E10: https://www.google.com/search?q=landman+season+1

Many years ago, like in 2017, my wife and I designed a dating app that was based on astrological matching. We knew it was tongue in cheek and advertised at as such. At that time we got a clear rejection from the App Store that they were no longer going to allow astrology apps. Fair enough, we pivoted the dating app to something else and it has been in the store doing fine for years now. But what we noticed was sometime around 2020, all of a sudden apple allowed a huge influx of new astrology apps into the store. It made no sense to us and seemed like bullshit, but what can you do?

Building web apps is far more enjoyable if only because you don't have to deal with the capricious nature of Apple's App Store review. It's non-deterministic CI at best.

It's why I love React Native and over the air updates. So I don't have to deal with this roulette.

The whole thing is stupid. If people want to get an Astrology app, who is Apple to say they won't carry it?

I am quite an Apple fan, but this dampens my enthusiasm considerably.

How many great apps are rejected, but build by people without reach?

I wonder how many people are turned off by iOS and have never bothered to learn to write an app for it in the first place?

It’s a shame that all these people that are using AI to code are using it to make iOS apps. Even the open-source ones are nice but you can’t install yourself unless you pay $99/year to Apple. Why not just make a great web app that does that job?

I have a terminal in the web app that I use to code on my laptop. I wanted to make a native app for my phone, but using Tailscale and just accessing the website on my phone is way better and I’m not dependent on app stores at all.