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DrJokepu 20 hours ago [-]
> But that’s not what happened at all. Godier proceeded through a series of escalations up to 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.”
> 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”.
rkunde 17 hours ago [-]
Ah yes, the Herobrine gambit
20 hours ago [-]
19 hours ago [-]
bdangubic 17 hours ago [-]
this often works even if you did in fact have “tarot function” and didnt remove it
midtake 20 hours ago [-]
But then you're lying. Why not add the comment "no tarot function" without reference to whether it existed in the past? A bit confusing because it's a trivial and seemingly unrelated statement but at least then you wouldn't be lying.
jodrellblank 18 hours ago [-]
Why not say “app now has no tarot function” which can be read as implying that it used to but doesn’t actually say that.
wussboy 16 hours ago [-]
It used to not have tarot function. It still doesn't. But it used to not too.
foco_tubi 14 hours ago [-]
RIP Mitch Hedburg you would have loved the App Store
psd1 8 hours ago [-]
You wanna see an app i wrote when i was less jaded? Every app i wrote is an app i wrote when i was less jaded.
knlam 10 hours ago [-]
You are dealing with unreasonable party here. Like the game theory, you have to think what is the next best move. I bet you have not deal with appstore review before, I remember last time even mention google or android in privacy policy will get your app rejected
port11 3 hours ago [-]
The endgame is that all apps publish a list of the functions they don’t have, to appease a baroque and obtuse review system.
bladeacidic 18 hours ago [-]
Why not just lie? The white lie is the most expedient thing to get the results you want, which is getting the app into the app store. It's not a slippery slope into a total moral decay of you as a human being. If a friend is hiding from an abusive partner, and that partner asks where your friend is, telling the truth would put your friend in danger, so lying is an important skill to have. The lie in this case gets past a pointless requirement.
dingaling 10 hours ago [-]
Lying is a subversion of morality and strawmanning doesn't change that.
If you can't state the truth, then don't answer.
sph 8 hours ago [-]
Thank you Kant, but the world is never as black-and-white
paxcoder 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
NamlchakKhandro 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
recursive 19 hours ago [-]
You can just add one and then remove it. That way you're not lying. And also it doesn't sound like you're disagreeing with them so you sound like a problem.
17 hours ago [-]
modzu 19 hours ago [-]
because it would be rejected again
ASalazarMX 19 hours ago [-]
"Tarot function is not present in this version, and won't be present in any releases future ever".
recursive 19 hours ago [-]
That makes it sound like they made a mistake.
twostorytower 19 hours ago [-]
They did.
recursive 17 hours ago [-]
Irrelevant. They have all the leverage and the submitter has none.
joshspankit 15 hours ago [-]
If being shown or admitting to their mistake was something they were cool with, this post wouldn’t exist
baybal2 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
echelon 20 hours ago [-]
Is Gruber starting to realize Apple's monopoly is bad?
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.
lapcat 18 hours ago [-]
> Is Gruber starting to realize Apple's monopoly is bad?
"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
madeofpalk 18 hours ago [-]
The criticism of monopolies is that market forces aren't able to let a failing system fail.
The App Store doesn't compete on its own merits because Apple actively prevents competition from letting it decide what the better system is.
lapcat 18 hours ago [-]
I believe Gruber's view is that the market forces in question are between iPhone and competing smartphones.
snackbroken 17 hours ago [-]
Market forces are not effective at creating good outcomes when there is an oligopoly.
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.
jgruber 17 hours ago [-]
No. It’s broader than that. The market forces are the entire realm of what’s possible, now and in the future. When Windows seemed entrenched forever, the platforms that eventually surpassed weren’t the competing desktop OSes (Mac and Linux). It was the web first, in the late 1990s-2000s, then mobile (iPhone and Android) in the 2010s.
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.
madeofpalk 3 hours ago [-]
The question is whether it's possible for a genuinely new competitor to arrive. Back in the earlier days, before Apple and Google were so entrenched, competitors weren't able to do it.
The modern smartphone became popular and dislodged the previous status quo because they were genuinely new form factors and interfaces. They didn't just steal the market away from Blackberry and Windows Phone, they invented a new one and starved out the previous.
And if a new platform were to arrive, they're so broad that it's entirely possible they wouldn't even compete on the App Store. When companies squeeze out and screw over others, and the market isn't able to signal that its not good, it's time for regulators to step in.
lapcat 17 hours ago [-]
> The market forces are the entire realm of what’s possible, now and in the future.
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.
applfanboysbgon 17 hours ago [-]
This is a ridiculous take. The iPhone was enabled by unrelated advances in computer hardware miniaturization, it had absolutely nothing to do with Windows' dominance creating "necessity". It was not competing with, and never did, replace Windows. Regulation is needed to ensure that people can compete within a market, not just create an entirely new market as enabled by technological advances which would have happened anyways.
jgruber 16 hours ago [-]
It's a little simplistic, sure, but I mean how much nuance do you expect me to fit into a HN comment? What I left out is Windows Mobile, which was Microsoft's attempt to extend the Windows hegemony to mobile devices. Here are Windows Mobile's US market share numbers, per Wikipedia:
Somebody came up with better phone technology. Which would have happened anyways. Your argument was that it was necessary for Microsoft and now Apple to have a monopoly in order to create "necessity" for innovation, but Microsoft's monopoly was not driving Moore's law. The iPhone would have happened with or without Windows Mobile.
pnt12 5 hours ago [-]
Oof. Gets screwed by a monopoly, defends monopolies: idealism is a chain. It frustrates me how some people are buried in this ideology, given 90% of it would be denied with Economics 101.
Yes, free markets are good to a lot of things. No, they don't adjust for complex matters if consumers don't understand then. No, they don't work when monopolies are involved. No, the government setting some boundaries is not the same as socialism.
Example: company adds a cheap ingredient to food that makes it tastier. Studies show a high chance of cancer. This doesn't affect the company margins, so it keeps adding and selling. Consumers are unaware, they keep buying. A good willing competitor has a dillema: poison its customers or lose clients to competition. Guess who can help? The state: it can forbid that ingredient! Now this levels the field for all companies and customers are healthy.
protimewaster 14 hours ago [-]
One of my issues with this is that the market is often pretty slow. With a lot of things, it feels like the market won't have resolved it until I've been dead for 150 years, and, to me, that's just about as good as not solving the problem at all.
eviks 16 hours ago [-]
He's myopic to the actual conflict. The system isn't failing, it's a very profitable business for Apple.
starik36 19 hours ago [-]
The other side of your coin is that I need to periodically visit my relatives and remove all sorts of malware and adware from their phones. Just like I've done with PCs over the past few decades.
baby_souffle 19 hours ago [-]
I get your point but neither the Play store or the Apple app store are devoid of malware.
iamnothere 19 hours ago [-]
Obviously the solution is to restrict the stores to a small, government-licensed list of apps that are known to be safe and regulated.
baby_souffle 15 hours ago [-]
> Obviously the solution is to restrict the stores to a small, government-licensed list of apps that are known to be safe and regulated.
I've been curious about the north korean mobile OS...
doublerabbit 18 hours ago [-]
Then you get government censorship. China for example.
Of course. I saw the /s and I was conjoining the rhetorical with an example.
Arodex 19 hours ago [-]
Then Apple should do its fucking job correctly. It is not a poor little company, they have no excuse for this rank incompetence. None.
preg_match 3 hours ago [-]
The problem is largely structural. Debian has huge repos and swaths of maintainers, and it works out because they read and audit source code to a degree. The end-result is that the Debian repos definitely have much less malware than either the play store or the Apple app store.
Apple does not audit source code, they do very simple behavioral analysis. And, evidently, even get that wrong, this post serving as an example.
turtlebits 18 hours ago [-]
I'm sure the number of submissions has gone up exponentially due to AI.
Since real people review apps, Apple should charge per app / version submission.
Timon3 18 hours ago [-]
Oh, is the 100$/year developer fee not enough? And all the money people pay for their devices? And the 30% cut for any App Store transaction? And the money from the advertisements?
Poor Apple needs to ask for even more money to do their job?
Sure seems like they could find some other way.
Arodex 18 hours ago [-]
You really can't just imagine Apple is doing a shit job.
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.
madeofpalk 18 hours ago [-]
It can explain, but it can’t excuse.
applfanboysbgon 16 hours ago [-]
> Since real people review apps, Apple should charge per app / version submission.
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.
epolanski 19 hours ago [-]
God forbids your relatives ever touch computers!
applfanboysbgon 19 hours ago [-]
> Come on, EU. Help us out here. Free us from distribution tyranny. Do it before Google morphs into the same hell beast.
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
aliasxneo 21 hours ago [-]
In my last SRE role I was the unfortunate victim of having to maintain a mobile app submitted to both the Android and iOS app stores. I would never wish it on my worst enemy. It was the one thing that I could absolutely _not_ guarantee any sort of reliability with. It was all up to the random person who happened to review the current release and the release process could be as quick as a day in the best circumstances or up to two weeks if we got a particularly difficult reviewer. They seem to have absolutely no context sharing between reviews.
wookmaster 3 hours ago [-]
This was my biggest shock when I decided to publish an app...there's no SLA they just do it whenever they feel apparently. Excitedly publish a very simple app to have it sit in queue for like 6 days was surprising.
port11 3 hours ago [-]
They’re bureaucrats interpreting the law as they see fit. We’ve had updates blocked because the word Android was mentioned in our in-app change-log.
szidev 21 hours ago [-]
What an insane ruling considering Co-Star is entirely an astrology app and was picked as an app store "Editor's Choice" at some point.
Jonovono 20 hours ago [-]
They arn't against Astrology apps. It's that there are a few categories where apple has just stopped allowing new ones since there are so many.
gervwyk 20 hours ago [-]
if true. this is insane
crazygringo 16 hours ago [-]
It's not. Apple regularly rejects apps when they appear to be functionally identical to 10+ existing apps.
They don't want 100 apps that do the exact same thing.
makeitdouble 14 hours ago [-]
> 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
mortenjorck 18 hours ago [-]
Look up "wireless printing" in the App Store sometime. As best I can tell, one or two actors have spammed the entire category with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of subscription-heavy repackagings of CUPS drivers as iOS apps. They all have very similar blue line-art icons of a printer, similar preview images with similar typography, and are all crammed full of subscription options.
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.
bigyabai 18 hours ago [-]
> the App Store will be the one real stain on his legacy
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.
dgellow 19 hours ago [-]
The guideline:
(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.
Grombobulous 19 hours ago [-]
This is such a dumb policy, and it's absolutely not even being followed.
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.
Jonovono 19 hours ago [-]
Don't worry. The next time you spend lots of time developing an app, Apple will be sure to reject it multiple times ;p
duxup 16 hours ago [-]
I’ve developed iOS and Android apps, store approvals are always a crap shoot, and it’s not just approvals, it’s paperwork… sudden rejections over something that was fine months earlier and getting pointed to a document that could mean ANYTHING.
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.
MerrimanInd 19 hours ago [-]
It's a massive problem that mobile apps are most users favorite way to consume programs yet are one of the few forms of distribution being gatekept by two massive and opinionated companies. It feels like the slow creeping rot at the foundation of the premise (and promise) of technology and the internet.
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."
rpdillon 20 hours ago [-]
This kind of thing reminds me of why I've always felt there shouldn't be a gatekeeper. Add your repos, install your apps. Folks should be allowed to have more than one repo to install apps from.
iamnothere 20 hours ago [-]
But if you allow users to have freedom, grandma will get hacked! We should all be told what to do and where to go and rely on gatekeepers for permission, for safety. (And no, of course there’s not any solution that would allow competent individuals to go outside the safe zone.)
MostlyStable 19 hours ago [-]
There is an easy solution to this: Allow the user to decide whether they want to allow for apps from outside a particular ecosystem. Then Johnny can set up Grandma's phone and (in a deep byzantine menu where she will never accidentally stumble on it, maybe locked behind a pin), Johnny can set it so that Granny's phone can only install software from "Super premium, high class, curated, guaranteed not to hack your phone" walled garden app store. And Johnny, on his own phone, can choose what to download himself, including from the "Buyer Beware, half our shit is malware" dark web app store.
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.
zbentley 18 hours ago [-]
There are two big problems with this (not that Apple’s caprice is the only alternative):
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.
preg_match 3 hours ago [-]
I think the bigger question is whether this is even worth solving. If people really want to give someone root access and do it willingly, maybe we just say this is out of our purview and allow it. And then, slowly, people will learn. They will be hard lessons but evidently baby proofing the entire world is not really working, so we might just abandon ship on that idea.
CamperBob2 18 hours ago [-]
And what if my grandma is Admiral Hopper. I wonder if there's a way to argue for or against paternalistic corporate gatekeepers without invoking sexism, ageism, or both?
zbentley 18 hours ago [-]
I used the terms from the grandparent post with tongue firmly in cheek. I didn’t intend to be sexist or ageist and agree with your criticism.
grishka 19 hours ago [-]
The society should change such that grandmas could decide for themselves whether they want tech or not, and still have a comfortable life if they choose to not use it. In our current society, smartphones and the internet are forced on everyone. It's not really a choice any more. Which is quite sad.
lazyasciiart 19 hours ago [-]
My grandma does want tech because she loves sharing pictures with her grandchildren throughout the day. That doesn’t mean she wants to send money to Nigeria through a fake banking app?
dgellow 19 hours ago [-]
You grandma can keep the „restricted“ flag on then. I will be happy to disable it on my device
macintux 19 hours ago [-]
My concern has been that companies with a huge install base (hi, Meta) would take advantage of this: "in order to provide you with the best experience, you have to turn off the restricted flag to install the next release of our app".
And then, billions of users cry out in pain as their private data is hoovered into the panopticon in the cloud.
Terr_ 16 hours ago [-]
One thing we could do is abolish the "anti-circumvention" laws, where the government goes after you with criminal penalties for "contempt of business-model" for interfering with how a company wishes it's code would run on your computer.
Then it would be legal for someone to develop and give-away a patch for the Meta app...
iamnothere 19 hours ago [-]
Exactly, and it’s impossible to regulate those business practices! Don’t even try! Better to limit what people can do on their own computing devices, or better yet remove that ownership entirely.
bigyabai 17 hours ago [-]
> And then, billions of users cry out in pain as their private data is hoovered into the panopticon in the cloud.
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.
ceejayoz 19 hours ago [-]
Grandma will also be happy to disable it when the nice man from Microsoft phone support calls in to remotely fix the viruses she has.
grishka 17 hours ago [-]
Then maybe everyone needs to be educated to never ever trust incoming calls from unknown numbers? Or maybe these need to be blocked at the carriers? We have all this AI crap now but for some reason we can't deploy it to detect scam calls. We instead use it to automate the work that doesn't need automation, like software engineering or copywriting or art.
ceejayoz 17 hours ago [-]
The average layperson doesn't even know caller ID can be trivially spoofed.
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.
zimpenfish 18 hours ago [-]
That's great until your device is weaponised against others (see: open HTTP proxies, open DNS resolvers, open SMTP servers, several billion IoT devices, and countless other examples)
iamnothere 18 hours ago [-]
Exactly, which is why we shouldn’t be allowing user “software installs” on any device, not just phones. The world would be a lot better if all tech were fully locked down, “freedom” be damned.
bigyabai 17 hours ago [-]
Ideally we should just let the government write the software, and they'd be able to verify that there's no dangers to grandma anywhere in the system.
It would be foolproof, maybe the most trustworthy system ever conceived.
grishka 13 hours ago [-]
While we're at it, let's also mandate the destruction of every general-purpose computing device incapable of secure boot or allowing it to be deactivated. And if someone dares to build a homebrew CPU out of relays, transistors, or logic ICs, they should expect the FBI to break down their door.
kalleboo 15 hours ago [-]
Those issues could be diminished if ISPs actually handled abuse requests and shut down people's connections until they removed their malware.
Last time I was in a bank branch they told me to go to the website for my issue.
grishka 17 hours ago [-]
> they told me to go to the website for my issue.
And this sort of attitude is exactly what needs to change.
ceejayoz 16 hours ago [-]
I agree!
But what's Grandma supposed to do in the meantime?
grishka 13 hours ago [-]
Tell them she doesn't own any devices that could connect to the internet. I'm sure they'll figure something out. They have to have procedures for this sort of thing.
ceejayoz 4 hours ago [-]
> They have to have procedures for this sort of thing.
"Sorry, try somewhere else" is the procedure.
iamnothere 3 hours ago [-]
Exactly. Rather than passing laws to require a non-digital option for these things, we should make sure that devices are locked down and controlled against users (aka hapless idiots).
ceejayoz 11 minutes ago [-]
> Rather than passing laws to require a non-digital option for these things...
Do you think I oppose this?
ceejayoz 20 hours ago [-]
There's a saying about how hard it can be to design bear-resistant containers:
> 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.
Scammers will manage to manipulate people into giving away all of their savings just fine no matter what restrictions are put in place. The excuse is just another "think of the children" to maintain control and profit.
ceejayoz 20 hours ago [-]
People will murder people, too.
We don't have to make it trivially easy.
Timon3 18 hours ago [-]
So your solution is to ban the sale of any kind of knife. Sucks that people can't really cook at home anymore, but do we have to make it trivially easy for murderers?
ceejayoz 17 hours ago [-]
> So your solution is to ban the sale of any kind of knife.
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?
preg_match 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Right but granny is not a child, she is kind of the opposite of a child.
You're essentially saying we should child proof the entire world, right. Appeal to the lowest common denominator and DO NOT offer back doors. But that's a plainly ridiculous notion and everyone knows it. This argument only works on smartphones right now because it's the status-quo. As soon as you extend it to literally any other domain, it immediately crumbles and falls between your fingers.
Yes, there IS a certain level of protection that is acceptable at all times. But that level is absolutely not "maximum protection, no other options sorry". Which is what Apple is trying to do. This really is "no sale of knives" type stuff. That sounds ridiculous, right? Because it is, and we let Apple get away with murder.
ceejayoz 9 minutes ago [-]
> Right but granny is not a child, she is kind of the opposite of a child.
The failure modes are often quite similar - cognitive/motor issues and lack of experience with the tools offered.
> Appeal to the lowest common denominator and DO NOT offer back doors.
Back doors accessible by scammers are bad for the same reasons back doors accessible by governments are.
> This really is "no sale of knives" type stuff. That sounds ridiculous, right? Because it is, and we let Apple get away with murder.
Apple's more like a shop that declines to sell knives. There are other shops that will sell you one.
Rohansi 17 hours ago [-]
Those are very different scenarios because your "protection" is the threat of consequences. You can freely buy and use knives, you can drive your own car, but you can only use your phone to do what Apple approves of? Sure, banning knives, replacing cars with public transport, and locking down all computers should be safer in theory... but murderers will still murder and scammers will still scam.
Social engineering is the weakest link even if your grandma is doing all her banking on Windows XP.
ceejayoz 17 hours ago [-]
> You can freely buy and use knives…
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.
"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?
Rohansi 14 hours ago [-]
> Hell, you'll get in trouble if your gasoline is the wrong color.
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.
ceejayoz 14 hours ago [-]
> You won't get in trouble for using your Apple device in non-approved ways because it doesn't let you.
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.
Rohansi 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
iamnothere 20 hours ago [-]
Exactly, computers should only be allowed to do what expert gatekeepers deem safe. There is no possible way to allow competent users to bypass this. Even if they had to go submit a blood sample and sign a document in front of a judge, grandma would just do it anyway! Lock it all down and make sure that compilers require a government license.
ceejayoz 20 hours ago [-]
The flip side of this is:
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.
iamnothere 19 hours ago [-]
Correct. As a side benefit we can restrict users from installing applications that go against other societal interests, like apps that allow unrestricted communications. The framework is complete for mobile devices, we just need to tackle PCs now.
ceejayoz 19 hours ago [-]
Loudly dismissing genuine and legitimate concerns may feel good, but it’s not likely to get you what you want, especially at a societal level.
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.
iamnothere 19 hours ago [-]
You’re precisely right, and of course there’s no possible way on Earth that we could create a safe way to allow users to install apps outside of the blessed path. No matter how many steps people have to go through, even if they have to pass a special exam to prove their competence, even if they have to sign something that says they could lose their life savings and submit it to a court to document this fact. There’s just not a single possible way to protect people to an adequate degree.
That the gatekeeper and government benefit from this arrangement is just a happy accident.
ceejayoz 18 hours ago [-]
There isn’t a way for everyone to be able to do what they want with computing devices and be safe from this shit.
That’s the reality. As with most things in society, it’s left to people to negotiate the balance.
iamnothere 18 hours ago [-]
Glad you agree that it’s simply impossible to protect most people and have freedom. Hopefully we can extend this approach to other areas of life soon. “Freedom” is overrated anyways!
ceejayoz 18 hours ago [-]
What freedom on the planet isn't restricted in some way for societal benefit?
iamnothere 18 hours ago [-]
I know, right! Here’s hoping we have many more restrictions in the future.
ceejayoz 18 hours ago [-]
Why comment on a site with zero interest in actually interacting with people?
iamnothere 18 hours ago [-]
I think there’s probably others reading too.
nullishdomain 19 hours ago [-]
I've published both iOS and visionOS apps, and my favorite rejection came from visionOS. When you click a link to open it in Safari, the system uses an existing Safari window if available. The app was rejected because the link didn’t work... the reviewer had Safari open somewhere outside their field of view. Approved on appeal :)
guessbest 19 hours ago [-]
This is funny because they aren't approving anything right now
It's been selective for sure. I have a macOS app that has been approved within a day. There are two apps I submit for a client both have cleared review twice in the past two weeks within 24 hours.
On the other hand I have a personal iOS app that normally doesn't take long to approve that's been waiting two weeks.
moonlighter 17 hours ago [-]
They are, but times vary between the iOS vs. the Mac App Store.
I recently submitted a new app to the Mac App Store and it took about one week to get initially approved (with one rejection because I had the word "Mac" in the app description (they said it's redundant since they're all Mac apps anyway...). Could've been a quick regex check in the form submission, but anyway, after the initial approval any subsequent feature submission afterwards usually got approved within 2-3 hours, same day, which is pretty good IMHO.
KingMob 10 hours ago [-]
Huh. Do they share review staff with Apple Pay certification? We've been waiting for 6 weeks, with complete silence from Apple.
john_strinlai 21 hours ago [-]
as much as i loathe astrology, im not sure why astrology would be blanket banned in the first place.
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.
This is likely an outlier. I submitted a new astronomy app (even with “Astro” in the name!) just a few months ago with no problem.
ilikeitdark13 18 hours ago [-]
Wow, that is beautiful.
darkhours 14 hours ago [-]
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quentindanjou 21 hours ago [-]
The "Astrology" reason emphasized in the article isn't the main reason, they actually quickly talk about it:
> 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.
settsu 20 hours ago [-]
Sounds like you'd make a fantastic iOS App Store submission reviewer!
postalcoder 21 hours ago [-]
There is no live tarot feature. Thats the point.
john_strinlai 21 hours ago [-]
i put tarot + astrology in the same bucket (and, it appears after some quick searches, so do astrologers and tarot-readers or however you call them)
>So that's it, they need to remove the live tarot reading.
dark hours doesnt have live tarot reading.
Jtarii 20 hours ago [-]
It is impressive that you seemingly read the article and still don't know what it was about.
burnte 17 hours ago [-]
> So that's it, they need to remove the live tarot reading. Which to me while not being astrology, isn't much better.
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?
Biganon 16 hours ago [-]
Essaie de lire l'article en entier, Quentin.
rcstank 20 hours ago [-]
You missed the fact that the article also explained there is no feature like that in the app.
smelendez 19 hours ago [-]
I actually thought the article could be more explicit about that, but in fairness I think the author figured readers were familiar with the app and that it would be obvious there’s no tarot functionality.
thewakalix 19 hours ago [-]
What could be more explicit than this?
> It has no tarot function, no horoscopes, and nothing that I, or anyone else I’ve asked, would associate with astrology.
ceejayoz 17 hours ago [-]
<marquee><blink><font size="72px" color="red">, I guess.
robertjpayne 21 hours ago [-]
Did you read the article the app contains no such thing anywhere it’s an astronomy app not astrology and is deeply rooted in real science
arjie 21 hours ago [-]
I wonder what the internals of the App Store process are. For most app approval processes you can tell because you'll get connections from the Philippines etc. so I assume what's going on here is that these reviewers have a range of English proficiency with a median below what an American developer is used to. Then the rest is just hallucination from the human, guessing at what they're looking at.
ceejayoz 20 hours ago [-]
All of my app review submissions come back at like 2-3am, so yeah.
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.
arjie 20 hours ago [-]
I had my privacy policy on a Lovable site. The embedded browser UI for the reviewer didn’t render JS and they would say I didn’t have a privacy policy. Took forever to figure out but tbh it’s my fault: the privacy policy should be visible on no JS.
tantalor 21 hours ago [-]
Is astrology not allowed in app store? That's kind of a weird thing to ban.
gcampos 21 hours ago [-]
Probably not directly, but indirect by the anti spam criteria: If there are too many similar apps, from whatever category, they will just reject new apps.
Rohansi 20 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't say it applies to all categories. I highly doubt they'll ever do it to games no matter how many clones of clones get published
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).
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.
dingaling 10 hours ago [-]
Yes, when I introduce my interests to new people these days I say "night-sky watching", instead of astronomy, just to avoid this problem.
"Astronomy? You don't really believe in all that nonsense do you? Jane, this guy believes those horoscopes in the paper!"
Sigh
edwinjm 21 hours ago [-]
I am quite an Apple fan, but this dampens my enthusiasm considerably.
How many great apps are rejected, but build by people without reach?
Grombobulous 19 hours ago [-]
Just don't be a fan of corporations. Period.
Even the good ones, looking at you Valve.
Am I happy and satisfied customer of some companies? Yes. Not a fan, though.
rpdillon 20 hours ago [-]
Their business model depends on you not looking too closely here. Apple has a lot of legitimate advantages, but they oversell the safety of the App Store quite a bit, and they also have an infamous review process for apps that deliberately hides both the reasoning and any sort of estimation of false positive / false negative rate. Google should have these sort of stats as well, but obviously neither company would publish them. False negatives should be observable by the public.
I'm a fan of letting users add repos from vendors they trust, so there isn't one centralized gatekeeper.
dinkblam 20 hours ago [-]
overselling the safety is very euphemistic
many years ago we made a list of malware apps on the Mac App Store:
(yes, the list was made after being disgruntled because totally legitimate apps were refused for nonsense reasons just like in this story)
par 20 hours ago [-]
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?
cdrnsf 19 hours ago [-]
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.
cageface 16 hours ago [-]
This is true but if you want to monetize it then there are similar review hurdles you're going to have to clear.
swe_dima 20 hours ago [-]
It's why I love React Native and over the air updates. So I don't have to deal with this roulette.
vondur 17 hours ago [-]
The whole thing is stupid. If people want to get an Astrology app, who is Apple to say they won't carry it?
Kim_Bruning 20 hours ago [-]
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?
fylo 20 hours ago [-]
I guest it wasn't "in the cards" for me
whywhywhywhy 19 hours ago [-]
The concept of computers that for programs to run on them need to be submitted to a committee who decides if the users computer can run it or not felt like where the tides were going for a long time.
Post AI this starts to feel absurd and look if OpenAI release a hardware device with an App Store will the process be days to weeks of review or will it be vibe code it in 40 minutes hit publish and it’s available to every device in 2 minutes?
Yeah think software is thankfully going towards a world where bureaucracy isn’t respected.
The apple decides what the box or square in your hand can do era is over.
theturtletalks 17 hours ago [-]
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.
catuscubitus 17 hours ago [-]
> It’s actually exquisitely well-designed and painstaking crafted. It’s exactly the sort of app that the App Store ought to celebrate and highlight.
Exactly what I thought at some point. Apple, or whoever they outsource their app store reviews to, certainly try hard to beat that kind of idealism out of people. I let my developer subscription run out and moved on to make web apps only. Never looked back.
jgruber 16 hours ago [-]
Just fixed the /painstaking/painstakingLY/ typo in this sentence. Thanks for quoting it here.
VCFundedGenYer 3 hours ago [-]
Stuff like this is always why I ruthlessly and aggressively push back against any Apple fanboyism claiming that the App Store protects users or makes them safer somehow. This kind of behavior from Apple is unacceptable. Sideloading needs to be forced upon them.
ungreased0675 17 hours ago [-]
At first I wondered if this was caused by a language barrier caused by outsourcing app review somewhere where labor is as cheap as possible.
Then I read more and realized it was just stupidity.
namanaggarwal 19 hours ago [-]
Honestly, reading this, I kinda feel they have an AI integration in the review tool, which hallucinate and tell them it’s Astrology and employees at that level don’t want to go against that judgement
atorodius 18 hours ago [-]
> We understand that the app includes a live tarot reading feature
I don’t understand why tarot reading apps are banned, can someone enlighten me?
ceejayoz 17 hours ago [-]
Apple has extremely/problematically vague guidelines about what constitutes spammy apps.
> 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.
1vuio0pswjnm7 1 hours ago [-]
"The App Store is not a functioning system."
16 hours ago [-]
drcongo 21 hours ago [-]
Reject this, but allow a billion spammy gambling scam apps pride of place in App Store searches. Gross.
20 hours ago [-]
stuart78 19 hours ago [-]
I've been waiting for several days on my MacOS app review. After many successful releases, somebody has decided to nitpick the App description. Fixed and resubmitted. Then, another rejection for some other related aspect of the description. Fixed and resubmitted, now waiting on next review.
I'm good to make the description complaint, of course, but it seems the reviewer immediately halts as soon as they encounter any issue. Would have been nice to get both feedback points on the first response, especially given how long it can take to get back to the top of the queue.
At the end of the day, I regret my choice to use the App Store at all.
nickndegwa 16 hours ago [-]
Dreading releasing my app to the stores, phew!
TooSmugToFail 20 hours ago [-]
Damn. What a shocking level of incompetence.
Has Apple really sunk that low?
dtagames 14 hours ago [-]
What's wrong here is that Apple decided devs need their permission to install standard web tech apps on Apple devices.
Apple is anti-dev, pro control of the income stream, and only interested in supporting devs that are all in on the cult.
The fact that the dev made a web version with all the same functionality just proves we don't need an app store nor Apple to gatekeep it.
> In a sworn deposition in the Epic lawsuit, Phillip Shoemaker, the former head of the App Review team, said employees in his department generally did not have a technical background in computer coding. They needed to know how to use a Mac and an iPhone, he said.
> “Qualifications were that they could breathe, they could think,” he said. And they typically worked at the Apple “Genius Bar” at the company’s retail stores. It typically took about 13 minutes to review a new app, Shoemaker said in the deposition.
ceejayoz 20 hours ago [-]
They're likely just ticking boxes on a checklist - does the app crash, does the app have a privacy policy, does the app permit chat?
Nothing about level one app review should need coding skills. Appeals, maybe, but even there, it's almost never about the code.
Grombobulous 19 hours ago [-]
This isn't really a bad thing. That's exactly what you want from an app reviewer. You want someone who has critical thinking skills but is looking at the app from the perspective of a typical customer.
Anything involving technical code review of apps on Apple's scale should be automated anyway.
lapcat 18 hours ago [-]
> has critical thinking skills
That's not what the court testimony said. Could think does not imply could think critically, especially not when preceded by "could breathe", which is an absurdly low bar. Might as well say, "not literally dead".
Grombobulous 13 hours ago [-]
You just chopped off the other part of the sentence to change the meaning.
> “Qualifications were that they could breathe, they could think,” he said.
“They could think” implies critical thinking skills.
Then the next sentence says they usually work at the Genius Bar, which is not at all an entry level role.
lapcat 7 hours ago [-]
> “They could think” implies critical thinking skills.
No, it does not. What do you think "they could breathe" implies? That they were athletes?
Grombobulous 58 minutes ago [-]
I think you’re purposefully misinterpreting the meaning of the quote to be a contrarian or to hate on Apple. I’m not a big fan of big corporate duopoly Apple, either, but I’m also not a fan of twisting words.
It’s clear that the meaning of the quote is that Apple doesn’t look for strict technical qualifications (“they could breathe”), they instead look for people who show an ability to think critically (“they could think”).
The passage also says that the app reviewers tend to be Genius Bar employees, which is a second level role within an already competitive high tier retailer. I.e., Apple retail rejects a lot of retail employees that go on to work for other retailers that have lower pay and benefits (most of the rest of the retail industry), and then out of those people who get accepted, many are rejected to work in the Genius Bar handling repairs and troubleshooting.
RagnarD 19 hours ago [-]
The most evil (yes) thing about the rejection is that the same stupid wrong misinformation about the app continued to be rubber-stamped as it propagated forward in what should be increasing levels of actual scrutiny and attention. They are lying to call it a review - it's mindless rubber-stamping either by design or because Apple employs people who just can't be bothered to do their jobs.
AlexandrB 21 hours ago [-]
I look forward to this app now being approved because getting a viral post on reddit/HN/Twitter is what passes for customer service in 2026.
classified 12 hours ago [-]
> The App Store is not a functioning system.
Sad to say this, but this has been known since forever.
justinhj 16 hours ago [-]
The author is right, the website is nice, but I am having trouble finding my star sign.
micromacrofoot 16 hours ago [-]
It's a fine app, but I'm not sure why gruber is glazing it so hard... is he not able to spot something so clearly built by AI? it's one of the better ones but it's got all the hallmarks. I'd be surprised if it's maintained a year from now.
scared_together 11 hours ago [-]
Is Gruber actually against AI-built apps?
He was against the unofficial Mac port of Notepad++ but that had many problems other than being AI-assisted.
micromacrofoot 4 hours ago [-]
it feels odd to me to praise it as beautifully crafted without mentioning that it's essentially stock AI aesthetics
to me craft is a human quality, I don't look at Ikea cabinets and praise their craft for example, and I'll admit that some of them are quite nice... it's just not the same process
erichocean 17 hours ago [-]
It took 90 days earlier this year for our venture-backed business to get approved by Apple merely for a corporate developer account, with all documentation available at the beginning of the process.
They are insanely, glacially slow.
sneak 18 hours ago [-]
The worst part is that for all of this, the App Store is still absolutely chock full of fraud apps, scam apps, and malware.
They deny great apps, fail to fix their mistakes, and leave heaps and heaps of actively malicious apps in place, in the top 40 in every category.
And we pay them 10x cc processing fees (30% instead of 3%) for this.
It’s pure rentseeking bullshit, and it goes against everything that made Apple Apple. It’s an actual tragedy.
19 hours ago [-]
another-account 17 hours ago [-]
Daaaaaaaaamn
ButlerianJihad 18 hours ago [-]
Perhaps try and not collide your app's exact name with a horror survival video game [2024: Steam, Xbox, Playstation] that involves a trickster demonic clown who tosses mysterious game-changing cards at you? I mean, I'm just guessing here. [Spoiler alert: I asked Gemini LLM to cut to the chase]
TRICKSTER
This entity is a demon-like clown that plays tricks on its victims. It is accompanied by Jack n Boxes that are triggered by cards he leaves around that offer good and bad results - the good result being the box that has a symbol that relates to the card you pick up. Instead of just killing you when he catches up, you have to go through what I call a "Just Dance" challenge. Hit the WASD, or whatever your keybinds are, when the indication reaches the box.
We ran into an interesting situation. After long hours we could not get the escape key in the egyptan level. We have a clown, where we have to follow the cards. We can obtain every fuse, we finsih with the objectives, but there are not any card left to find, and the exit key was not it the middle of the lasers ( a mystery card was there). And one additional info, we also could not found the key for administrator 1... any suggestion ?
This is just one property named "Dark Hours"; there are horror films and mystery novels, and while it's a cromulent name for astronomy, just looking at the name gave me feelings of spiritualism or prophecy, on top of those cool nights watching Perseids with Dad and sister, in the flat field.
Your website, darkhours dot io, is six days old. That is, it was created on August 1st, and it was not spotted by web.archive.org, until August 2, 2026. So your "Dark Hours" naming is really, really late to the game, so to speak. You should change your name before the game-makers of "Piece of Cake Studio" find you and send a cease and desist to change your domain name, before .io registrar revokes it, which appears to be in Colorado and/or the British Indian Ocean, for all intents and purposes.
darkhours 13 hours ago [-]
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kdot 21 hours ago [-]
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darkhours 14 hours ago [-]
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underlipton 19 hours ago [-]
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wildredkraut 18 hours ago [-]
What's so bad about tarot cards? I put it into the same pot as all the other religious stuff, all just believes.
eek2121 18 hours ago [-]
My immediate thought upon clicking the link referenced in the article, is that the first thing I see is at first glance looks like astrological signs taking up the entire height of the page.
I'm not defending Apple at all (I'm a developer, I've not specifically worked on apps for iDevices, however I've worked closely with those that take our platforms and tie them into those apps at many companies and startups)
I've also not finished reading the article, however right away, based on what I've read, I see the problem. Apple reviews a thousands upon thousands of apps a day, and the folks reviewing those apps (and now, AI) aren't going to continue to review an app when they see a potential violation. It is up to the app developer to be clear and concise.
Apple is a pain to deal with, I get that. However, I see why it was rejected. Continuing to read the article now.
EDIT: read the rest of it. My take is that they are probably employing AI based upon the odd response (which is dumb, also note, Apple has been using forms of machine learning for years to assist with this stuff. When I say AI, I specifically refer to LLMs).
Something that I think folks really need to pay attention to, however, is the first impression. The app reviewer doesn't just hit a reject button and call it a day. They take notes. Notes that aren't shared with you, just among folks that may review it again in the future. When it is re-reviewed, those notes are taken into consideration and given a ton of weight. That is why it is important to give a perfect presentation the first time around. If you have 30 seconds to re-review an app that was rejected and you have notes (and possibly a screenshot or two? I don't know if Apple does that part) of what was presented during the previous review, you aren't going to do a whole bunch of investigating if it looks like nothing has changed. You have deadlines that impact your performance review, you will move on and rubber stamp the re-review. The next level up will take slightly longer, etc.
burnte 17 hours ago [-]
> My immediate thought upon clicking the link referenced in the article, is that the first thing I see is at first glance looks like astrological signs taking up the entire height of the page.
Sadly this is unavoidable as constellations are used in astronomy and astrology. They both also use letters and numbers. That doesn't mean they're the same thing.
> Something that I think folks really need to pay attention to, however, is the first impression. The app reviewer doesn't just hit a reject button and call it a day.
With respect I think you need to reread the actual blog post about the app rejection. It's pretty clear the app reviewer took a quick look and rejected it without any understanding at all. I don't know why you think these reviewers are so conscientious, they're line workers and sometimes they just get sick of the grind and it's easy to reject. They're human.
Handy-Man 18 hours ago [-]
Well then you clearly should have read it first. As it kept getting escalated and went to review board and was still rejected stating first review was correct.
> 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”.
If you can't state the truth, then don't answer.
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.
The modern smartphone became popular and dislodged the previous status quo because they were genuinely new form factors and interfaces. They didn't just steal the market away from Blackberry and Windows Phone, they invented a new one and starved out the previous.
And if a new platform were to arrive, they're so broad that it's entirely possible they wouldn't even compete on the App Store. When companies squeeze out and screw over others, and the market isn't able to signal that its not good, it's time for regulators to step in.
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.
Yes, free markets are good to a lot of things. No, they don't adjust for complex matters if consumers don't understand then. No, they don't work when monopolies are involved. No, the government setting some boundaries is not the same as socialism.
Example: company adds a cheap ingredient to food that makes it tastier. Studies show a high chance of cancer. This doesn't affect the company margins, so it keeps adding and selling. Consumers are unaware, they keep buying. A good willing competitor has a dillema: poison its customers or lose clients to competition. Guess who can help? The state: it can forbid that ingredient! Now this levels the field for all companies and customers are healthy.
I've been curious about the north korean mobile OS...
Apple does not audit source code, they do very simple behavioral analysis. And, evidently, even get that wrong, this post serving as an example.
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
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.
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.
Which makes this a good time to remind everyone about the Keep Android Open movement:
https://keepandroidopen.org/
> "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?
"Sorry, try somewhere else" is the procedure.
Do you think I oppose this?
> 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?
Right but granny is not a child, she is kind of the opposite of a child.
You're essentially saying we should child proof the entire world, right. Appeal to the lowest common denominator and DO NOT offer back doors. But that's a plainly ridiculous notion and everyone knows it. This argument only works on smartphones right now because it's the status-quo. As soon as you extend it to literally any other domain, it immediately crumbles and falls between your fingers.
Yes, there IS a certain level of protection that is acceptable at all times. But that level is absolutely not "maximum protection, no other options sorry". Which is what Apple is trying to do. This really is "no sale of knives" type stuff. That sounds ridiculous, right? Because it is, and we let Apple get away with murder.
The failure modes are often quite similar - cognitive/motor issues and lack of experience with the tools offered.
> Appeal to the lowest common denominator and DO NOT offer back doors.
Back doors accessible by scammers are bad for the same reasons back doors accessible by governments are.
> This really is "no sale of knives" type stuff. That sounds ridiculous, right? Because it is, and we let Apple get away with murder.
Apple's more like a shop that declines to sell knives. There are other shops that will sell you one.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Cleo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Edward#Crossing_Over_with...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi
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
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.
"Astronomy? You don't really believe in all that nonsense do you? Jane, this guy believes those horoscopes in the paper!"
Sigh
How many great apps are rejected, but build by people without reach?
Even the good ones, looking at you Valve.
Am I happy and satisfied customer of some companies? Yes. Not a fan, though.
I'm a fan of letting users add repos from vendors they trust, so there isn't one centralized gatekeeper.
many years ago we made a list of malware apps on the Mac App Store:
https://www.corecode.io/_malware_on_the_macappstore.html
(yes, the list was made after being disgruntled because totally legitimate apps were refused for nonsense reasons just like in this story)
Post AI this starts to feel absurd and look if OpenAI release a hardware device with an App Store will the process be days to weeks of review or will it be vibe code it in 40 minutes hit publish and it’s available to every device in 2 minutes?
Yeah think software is thankfully going towards a world where bureaucracy isn’t respected.
The apple decides what the box or square in your hand can do era is over.
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.
Exactly what I thought at some point. Apple, or whoever they outsource their app store reviews to, certainly try hard to beat that kind of idealism out of people. I let my developer subscription run out and moved on to make web apps only. Never looked back.
Then I read more and realized it was just stupidity.
I don’t understand why tarot reading apps are banned, can someone enlighten me?
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#des...
> 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.
I'm good to make the description complaint, of course, but it seems the reviewer immediately halts as soon as they encounter any issue. Would have been nice to get both feedback points on the first response, especially given how long it can take to get back to the top of the queue.
At the end of the day, I regret my choice to use the App Store at all.
Has Apple really sunk that low?
Apple is anti-dev, pro control of the income stream, and only interested in supporting devs that are all in on the cult.
The fact that the dev made a web version with all the same functionality just proves we don't need an app store nor Apple to gatekeep it.
> In a sworn deposition in the Epic lawsuit, Phillip Shoemaker, the former head of the App Review team, said employees in his department generally did not have a technical background in computer coding. They needed to know how to use a Mac and an iPhone, he said.
> “Qualifications were that they could breathe, they could think,” he said. And they typically worked at the Apple “Genius Bar” at the company’s retail stores. It typically took about 13 minutes to review a new app, Shoemaker said in the deposition.
Nothing about level one app review should need coding skills. Appeals, maybe, but even there, it's almost never about the code.
Anything involving technical code review of apps on Apple's scale should be automated anyway.
That's not what the court testimony said. Could think does not imply could think critically, especially not when preceded by "could breathe", which is an absurdly low bar. Might as well say, "not literally dead".
> “Qualifications were that they could breathe, they could think,” he said.
“They could think” implies critical thinking skills.
Then the next sentence says they usually work at the Genius Bar, which is not at all an entry level role.
No, it does not. What do you think "they could breathe" implies? That they were athletes?
It’s clear that the meaning of the quote is that Apple doesn’t look for strict technical qualifications (“they could breathe”), they instead look for people who show an ability to think critically (“they could think”).
The passage also says that the app reviewers tend to be Genius Bar employees, which is a second level role within an already competitive high tier retailer. I.e., Apple retail rejects a lot of retail employees that go on to work for other retailers that have lower pay and benefits (most of the rest of the retail industry), and then out of those people who get accepted, many are rejected to work in the Genius Bar handling repairs and troubleshooting.
Sad to say this, but this has been known since forever.
He was against the unofficial Mac port of Notepad++ but that had many problems other than being AI-assisted.
to me craft is a human quality, I don't look at Ikea cabinets and praise their craft for example, and I'll admit that some of them are quite nice... it's just not the same process
They are insanely, glacially slow.
They deny great apps, fail to fix their mistakes, and leave heaps and heaps of actively malicious apps in place, in the top 40 in every category.
And we pay them 10x cc processing fees (30% instead of 3%) for this.
It’s pure rentseeking bullshit, and it goes against everything that made Apple Apple. It’s an actual tragedy.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=33623...
https://www.darkhours-thegame.com/This is just one property named "Dark Hours"; there are horror films and mystery novels, and while it's a cromulent name for astronomy, just looking at the name gave me feelings of spiritualism or prophecy, on top of those cool nights watching Perseids with Dad and sister, in the flat field.
https://nic.io/whois-search.htm?domain_name=darkhours.io
Your website, darkhours dot io, is six days old. That is, it was created on August 1st, and it was not spotted by web.archive.org, until August 2, 2026. So your "Dark Hours" naming is really, really late to the game, so to speak. You should change your name before the game-makers of "Piece of Cake Studio" find you and send a cease and desist to change your domain name, before .io registrar revokes it, which appears to be in Colorado and/or the British Indian Ocean, for all intents and purposes.
I'm not defending Apple at all (I'm a developer, I've not specifically worked on apps for iDevices, however I've worked closely with those that take our platforms and tie them into those apps at many companies and startups)
I've also not finished reading the article, however right away, based on what I've read, I see the problem. Apple reviews a thousands upon thousands of apps a day, and the folks reviewing those apps (and now, AI) aren't going to continue to review an app when they see a potential violation. It is up to the app developer to be clear and concise.
Apple is a pain to deal with, I get that. However, I see why it was rejected. Continuing to read the article now.
EDIT: read the rest of it. My take is that they are probably employing AI based upon the odd response (which is dumb, also note, Apple has been using forms of machine learning for years to assist with this stuff. When I say AI, I specifically refer to LLMs).
Something that I think folks really need to pay attention to, however, is the first impression. The app reviewer doesn't just hit a reject button and call it a day. They take notes. Notes that aren't shared with you, just among folks that may review it again in the future. When it is re-reviewed, those notes are taken into consideration and given a ton of weight. That is why it is important to give a perfect presentation the first time around. If you have 30 seconds to re-review an app that was rejected and you have notes (and possibly a screenshot or two? I don't know if Apple does that part) of what was presented during the previous review, you aren't going to do a whole bunch of investigating if it looks like nothing has changed. You have deadlines that impact your performance review, you will move on and rubber stamp the re-review. The next level up will take slightly longer, etc.
Sadly this is unavoidable as constellations are used in astronomy and astrology. They both also use letters and numbers. That doesn't mean they're the same thing.
> Something that I think folks really need to pay attention to, however, is the first impression. The app reviewer doesn't just hit a reject button and call it a day.
With respect I think you need to reread the actual blog post about the app rejection. It's pretty clear the app reviewer took a quick look and rejected it without any understanding at all. I don't know why you think these reviewers are so conscientious, they're line workers and sometimes they just get sick of the grind and it's easy to reject. They're human.