A Tumblr developer on the App Store approval process

https://sreegs.tumblr.com/post/671649355334336512/alright-lets-talk-about-apple-and-tumblrs

by AndrewDucker • 5 years ago

194 155 5 years ago

sreegs.tumblr.com

If rejecting apps that can lead to adult content (but not necessarily the main focus) seems to be the norm, how do reddit apps get around it?

neltnerb2• 5 years ago

The article also mentioned twitter and instagram. All the apps that let you look at user generated content.

mintplant• 5 years ago

Instagram forbids NSFW content platform-wide.

numpad0• 5 years ago

New accounts created on iOS is disallowed NSFW content and it has to be explicitly enabled from browsers

noahtallen• 5 years ago

Just double checked — it seems there is a “allow NSFW” content switch in the iOS system settings. Reddit on iOS gives you a link into the system settings app when you search for NSFW content. But it does appear to be disabled by default in anonymous browsing mode anyways.

AnthonyMouse• 5 years ago

The article has some speculation about this. A combination of Apple not wanting to ban larger apps like that, and larger companies having more staff to resubmit the app a thousand times to get through the thousand arbitrary rejections.

rootusrootus• 5 years ago

IIRC the most popular Reddit app on iOS is Apollo, which is just a solo developer.

wmaca• 5 years ago

so true. we submitted an app that had “Sign In With Apple” in a localized version.

One reviewer rejected saying it should be “Continuar com a Apple”, we submitted and, on a later review, reviewer rejected saying it should be “Conectar com Apple” which it already was the first time.

That is extremely frustrating and arbitrary.

echelon• 5 years ago

Document and publish your experiences. It'll help countries in their fight against the App Store monopoly.

(Monopoly in the sense that 50+% of users in any given country are using a platform that only allows Apple approved and taxed instructions to run. Dating, entertainment, finance, etc. are Apple serfs.)

zepto• 5 years ago

All those things can be done via the browser.

Keirmot• 5 years ago

Well, the Sign in/Sign up with apple button automatically does the localisation. My guess is that you designed your own button and used your own localisation for Portuguese. On the first instance you found a Portuguese reviewer, and on the second a Brazilian.

saagarjha6• 5 years ago

In the case of Tumblr, this would be a reviewer going to search, typing in something like 'tits’ and finding porn.

Just want to emphasize this part. App Store Reviewers are completely asinine. Like, dumb as a rock. It’d almost be funny if their stupidity didn’t block your app approval.

To be explicitly clear: if your app contains UGC, they will explicitly go and search for things to ding you on, and then fault you when you find it. They will go to the search bar and type in “milf” or “butts” (I wish I were joking). They’ll try to search for drugs on your marketplace. If your app runs scripts, they’ll try downloading something and then yell at you for letting them do it. The review messages they leave you bend over backwards to try to fault you for what they do in the app…things like “during review, your app downloaded code” (the reviewer went out of their way to find a way to load a script from the internet) or “your app presents adult content” (the reviewer created an account and immediately searched for “sex”). These are the people who misspell their demo account passwords and will claim the app is broken, so these idiots are almost proud when they find these, almost like they’re finding a gotcha.

Of course, these rejections are all bogus. In a good system they wouldn’t happen, or if they did you’d dismiss them summarily. Instead, you need to plead and escalate until you find a person who’s not a complete bozo. Sometimes, in desperation, you come up with random filters in the hopes that they’ll just leave you alone this time. Careful, though: if you give up too much ground you won’t have any to give next time.

The entire process is just designed to wear you down, to create apps that conform to a pretty image where people post about their dogs and food rather than anything that could possibly be objectionable. Platforms rightfully try to keep their own standards on their content, but many slowly give up and slide into what’s easy to defend. Apple is only behind payment processors and advertisers in forcing platforms to prude up :(

AnonHP2• 5 years ago

This reminds me of security guards at various places, such as malls or parks. They take great pleasure in “enforcement” and in inconveniencing people beyond the limits of common sense. Their work happens to be the place where they can exert control while other areas of their lives may not be so great. I wonder if the App Store review recruitment process somehow (inadvertently?) selects for such people who “take it out” on the app developers because the other areas of their lives are terrible.

These stories are all about exerting control, and bring no value whatsoever for Apple.

For these and other reasons, I hope Apple is forced to allow side loading of apps. Apple hasn’t spent a lot of effort on the App Store (despite PR claims to the contrary). Seriously, the person at the top in charge of the App Store has been sleeping on the wheel for a long time.

saagarjha6• 5 years ago

I call them stupid, but mostly because they act like they are stupid. My impression is that Apple's policies basically force them to be like that–they're worked hard, with little time given on each app, and probably graded on some sort of scale that incentivizes finding problems in apps. And, I mean, not everyone is an expert in the App Store Review Guidelines–it's actually fairly long, there's a lot of case law you need to take into account, and a bunch of unwritten policies that only get attention when your app happens to hit it and you know what is going on.

What Apple really needs to do is basically tell all their reviewers to stop flagging apps on this. It just causes general discontent everywhere: it's an obvious annoyance to developers hit by it, and the ones that know how to fight it will drag it on with you and hate you the entire time, and the ones that don't will change their apps and also hate you the entire time. I think–and this is just a guess–that they don't do this because they just don't want to have this content at all, not for any sort of prudishness, but because of the exact same reason everyone else shuns it: it's frequently a source of problems, they get into trouble with it when the news covers it in a bad light, etc. They like having blanket authority in this area, and think that whatever problems they're causing (which they are absolutely aware of, by the way) are just not a big deal, just like they are holding on to their 30% or whatever.

Of course, whatever reasons they have mean very little when the net effect is that this "problematic" content gets hounded off of the platform. You can say you don't hate this all you want, but when the actions you take have an effect in a certain direction and you don't do anything about it even when presented evidence about it, you're basically just accepting that you don't value it very much. And, frankly, that's just total garbage, because Apple wants to control all distribution on iOS, which means they have a moral obligation to deal with all of these issues. You don't get to wipe your hands clean of things you don't like and also say you want to be the sole arbiter for everything. But that's just a familiar big tech thing ;)

Anon1096• 5 years ago

How do Reddit and Twitter pass the App Store review process? I'm pretty sure you can trivially find porn by searching for it.

chanc3e• 5 years ago

Have designed and built apps for several high profile brands.

When you are big enough: apple occasionally send an engineer to share upcoming features, or nudge you in a direction they are keen to promote (2018 it was all AR) and at this point someone in C-Suite has a human contact to smooth out App Store BS.

So OP is correct in that it’s about size/apple seeing you as an asset and not a problem - they want those shiny family friendly releases for advertising material.

I used to think the App Store governance was a good idea. I no longer do.

phreack2• 5 years ago

When you're big enough, there's a chance that the boss's boss at Apple uses your app and will come talk to you and save you from The Process.

Also, if everyone uses your app, when it breaks then people will not necessarily complain to you, but to Apple instead since people can't tell the difference between the phone and the app, so to avoid the idea that your phone breaks, Apple will let you update your app instantly.

malwarebytess• 5 years ago

Can you? Reddit makes you change a setting, save it, reload the page, uncheck a couple more settings, save, before you can see adult content these days. per-account

quick test logged out:

search "butts" -> no nsfw results on first page search "tits" -> a couple unlabeled nsfw posts (against reddit rules.)

JimDabell5• 5 years ago

They follow this rule:

If your app includes user-generated content from a web-based service, it may display incidental mature “NSFW” content, provided that the content is hidden by default and only displayed when the user turns it on via your website.

— https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#use...

crossroadsguy• 5 years ago

App Store Reviewers are completely asinine

I recently had an interaction with a food delivery customer care executive (many like this; of other businesses as well) and the kind of conversation I had with them it seemed to me that someone must have flattened the brain matter with a rock before stuffing it back inside their skulls.

Then it dawned upon me. Nope. They just are as much a victim of these huge corps and their lawyers and their policies that any slip could mean losing their jobs if it turned out that they didn't toe the written line by the letter.

ricardobayes3• 5 years ago

At this point it's really better to automatize support. They can't do anything a policy rule-based bot couldn't do.

annexrichmond• 5 years ago

Yeah I found the fact that Apple removed Tumblr for explicit content and not Reddit or Twitter to be completely arbitrary.

People usually don’t like governments picking winners and losers, and so they shouldn’t like companies doing so.

thewebcount• 5 years ago

They will go to the search bar and type in “milf” or “butts” (I wish I were joking). They’ll try to search for drugs on your marketplace.

I don’t understand why you think that’s dumb. This is what people who download the app will do, so they’re trying out real scenarios that will happen. They don’t want to have there be a segment on the nightly news saying, “App Store Full of Porn!” Which is what will happen in these scenarios. That doesn’t excuse letting Twitter and Reddit get away with it, of course, but it makes perfect sense that they do that. There’s nothing dumb about it.

mattigames• 5 years ago

Why would the news say that app store is full of porn when you search it on Tumblr but not when you search it on Reddit? If they let at least one company do it it does seem kind of dumb.

sudosysgen• 5 years ago

That doesn't make sense to me. The iPhone comes with a web browser. If a user wants milfs and butts they can put that in the address bar.

danjac• 5 years ago

Why not just stick on an NSFW warning and restrict downloads for minors, and maybe treat your adult users as adults?

trymas• 5 years ago

This is what people who download the app will do, so they’re trying out real scenarios that will happen. They don’t want to have there be a segment on the nightly news saying, “App Store Full of Porn!” Which is what will happen in these scenarios.

Lets ban web browsers.

xg152• 5 years ago

So the general agreement is that people should not be allowed to consume porn in the united states?

saagarjha6• 5 years ago

There’s a couple of responses already, but I think they miss the main point: when the Apple reviewer goes out and does this, they don’t mark your app for “unrestricted web access” (which is the category third party browsers go in, and immediately makes them rated 17+). That would actually make sense, even if you consider it “unfair” because Apple’s own apps of course don’t get those ratings.

No, the problem is that when a reviewer finds anything “questionable” in your app, they mark it as a porno app. Pornographic apps cannot be in the App Store. That rule is designed to keep PornHub off the store (again, putting the morality of this aside…) and yet Apple equates your app with them even if 99% of your content is squeaky clean. The reviewers specifically seek out content that they want to flag, and the problem is that they then reject it by representing it as if they just stumbled upon it by accident, or that it’s so prevalent that it’s obviously the purpose of your app. So now you’re stuck arguing that your app is not a portal for porn in these absurd cases where the reviewer has, through their misunderstanding of the rule, changed the argument from “is your app primarily focused around the consumption of pornography” to “does your app make nudity available to a determined user”?

daoismyname3• 5 years ago

. This is what people who download the app will do, so they’re trying out real scenarios that will happen

let's ban browsers then or chat apps or sharing apps

and why not apps in general that play images and videos and that enable people to send aforementioned images and videos?

you know what? now that I think about it, let's ban the smart (computing) part from iPhone.

but let's not stop there, let's ban the phone part too, because one could always call an hotline or make a booty call...

skhr0680• 5 years ago

The app store should have porn. I'm sick of American corporations' War on Breasts. These days the comedy bit would be "7 words you can't say on the App Store"

grishka4• 5 years ago

So allow sideloading. Problem solved.

And as a nice bonus, app store would then have to actually compete with those alternate sources. As macOS shows, when the use of the app store is not mandatory, almost none of the developers will be taking the app store seriously and will instead handle the distribution of their apps themselves just fine.

hulitu• 5 years ago

Is Safari not able to search for porn on iOS ? Or is Apple only trying to protect their revenue sources ?

Flameancer• 5 years ago

I feel like with that logic web browsers should be banned including their own. There’s nothing stopping me from buying a brand new iPhone and immediately opening up safari and finding porn. Heck even their own search feature built into the OS can do this. Rules for thee and not for me.

null_object2• 5 years ago

They will go to the search bar and type in “milf” or “butts” (I wish I were joking). They’ll try to search for drugs on your marketplace. If your app runs scripts, they’ll try downloading something and then yell at you for letting them do it

This is all just fictional garbage, which you totally made-up.

I’ve been through hundreds of app reviews, and if a problem is ever found (rarely) the reviews are always polite, and carefully worded, erring on the cautious, and with absolutely zero chance that anyone from Apple is ever “yelling”.

Incredibly sad indictment of HN that these glaring untruths are given any credence at all.

PaywallBuster• 5 years ago

op mentions it largely happens for UGC content apps

so no surprise you haven't found any such reviews if you're doing completely different apps

LocalH2• 5 years ago

You have fallen into the trap of “it’s not like this for me, so this person is lying”

jjoonathan3• 5 years ago

Well I guess my own experiences with Apple reviews must be fictional garbage too then!

(I should clarify that, like GP, I am referring to the substance of the review, not the tone.)

dang• 5 years ago

Please make your substantive points without breaking the site guidelines. You did that badly here.

If your point happens to be correct, this is particularly important, because by posting like this you end up discrediting it. Your comment would be just fine without the first and third paragraphs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: you've unfortunately been doing this repeatedly (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29549948) and we've had to warn you about it at least once before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29109123). Would you please stop posting like this? We ban accounts that keep breaking the site guidelines and ignore our requests to stop, and I don't want to ban you.

cblconfederate4• 5 years ago

Looks like they get paid per rejection

alufers• 5 years ago

Couldn't you just create an account for them that has a few whitelisted posts that are squeaky clean? Or better yet apply the whitelist when a request is made from a not-yet-released version of the app, based on headers?

saagarjha6• 5 years ago

Secretly giving Apple’s reviewers a different version of the app is a very good way to get them really upset at you. (And, IMO, rightfully so: you’re no longer acting in good faith. They might not be either, but when you’ve changed your position you lose the ability to make the “we tried our best to be reasonable” argument.)

grishka4• 5 years ago

Oh yeah. At my previous job at a large Russian social media company, I remember our app getting rejected over this. They went to the video section, disabled safe search, and searched "porn". Lo and behold, naked people came up! And this was the reason for rejection. Like, what tf did you expect to see by doing that, cat videos?! And it's not corporate America, so our ToS did not disallow porn. From our point of view, the app is just working as intended, and no rules were broken. And the app was rated 18+ anyway.

And then "illegal file sharing". On a strange coincidence, they started enforcing that one relentlessly just as Apple Music was preparing to launch. Yes, you could upload, search, and stream mp3s on our service without any regard to this dumb thing called "copyright". No, it's none of Apple's business to be policing any of this.

IMO, at this point, the only way out of this is for Apple to be forced by law to allow sideloading apps on iOS.

edit: I now vaguely remember that at some point we created special limited accounts for iOS reviewers. This somewhat eased the pain, but they would sometimes sign up for their own accounts too and see things they weren't meant to see. I didn't participate in any of this first-hand because I was working on the Android app.

19h• 5 years ago

Was this Russian social media company Vkontakte?

vmception• 5 years ago

a little part of me also wants to be cynical and say that since Instagram and Twitter are so big, they can get away with more than Tumblr can.

Didnt this get leaked?

Maybe that was about Facebook/Meta’s exemption of celebrity accounts

And I also might be confusing this for abuse of Apple’s enterprise signing key

Either way, small club and Tumblr aint in it

lwansbrough• 5 years ago

Last week we published a news article advertising a holiday deal for our premium subscription. Of course, our app shows our news articles.

So the following day, while we were submitting a bug fix release, a reviewer rejected the app on the grounds that it advertised a premium service that was not available via Apple’s IAP subscriptions. We later found out they were talking about the news article preview tile. Their demand was that we remove all outbound links to the domain that hosts the premium content unless we implement Apple’s subscriptions. This would have included news articles, guides, account sign in and settings and other core components of the app that just happened to link to the site.

So we did the only thing we could do. The entire engineering team committed the rest of the week (including the weekend) to complying with Apple’s demand and we integrated Apple payments into our backend and app. Of course this blocked us from deploying critical bug fixes but we had no other option.

AnonHP2• 5 years ago

The other side of this coin are apps that blatantly show banners on opening them to go to their website and purchase a subscription for cheaper. I reported one such app a few times to Apple (using the new report an issue feature on the App Store). It’s probably been at least a couple of months, and that app still continues to do the same.

It’s very clear that the rules are arbitrary and are not enforced uniformly. Apple doesn’t even seem to have an inclination to solve issues when they’re pointed out.

aero-glide2• 5 years ago

Why would you report such a thing? Cut out the middleman.

skeletal88• 5 years ago

Why are you supporting apple and the 30% cut they take? Why do you as a user want apple to continue this?

We are developing a system for our client where their users have to buy a one time token to use it. The tokens are bought from the client's web shop. The iphone and android apps are webviews that contain the website. This was the only sane way to develop the apps because otherwise we would have to constantly deal with the idiotic review process. For example - we had added google sign in but zpple refused our review until we also added apple sign in. A feature that I haven't heard anyone of the customers actually use. Or we had a button going to the webshop. Had to remove this one because apple wanted a 30% cut. If apple got 30% of every token bought then our client wouldn't be in the business at all.

felipelemos• 5 years ago

How dare they try to circumvent Apple's magnanimous and generous 30% profit cut and offer a cheaper subscription?

JimDabell5• 5 years ago

They announced they would no longer do that last year:

for apps that are already on the App Store, bug fixes will no longer be delayed over guideline violations except for those related to legal issues.

– https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-reveals-new-dev...

What did they say when you appealed the decision?

mrVentures• 5 years ago

We were banned for encouraging users to fight terrorism

https://www.appunwrapper.com/2019/07/03/apple-rejects-nsa-in...

aylmao• 5 years ago

I agree that it seems unfair that Tumblr has to deal with this while Twitter for example does not. Nonetheless, IMO it's not without reason. At least as of not long ago, it was much easier to accidentally bump into or see recommendations for adult content in Tumblr than in other social media. There's plenty of memes about "girls" being a banned term now, but Tumblr was notoriously full of CSAM.

I don't know if and how much Tumblr has improved in these fronts recently, but say what you will about Reddit, Twitter, etc. if you don't look for sexual material, you won't have it on your feed. They're also very good at keeping illicit material out of the platform.

I really hope Tumblr gets better at moderation. Outright banning a bunch of terms like this sounds like a desperate attempt at just getting rid of porn after years of not being able to control it, but far from an actual moderation strategy.

djrockstar12• 5 years ago

It's appalling to me that iOS developers still exist after all the hoops you have to jump through to get an iOS app out. I'm a web developer that got roped into developing and then publishing a react native app for android and iOS. The android process was relatively painless compared to the crap Apple has you do. For starters, you can't even produce an app build without running on iOS, so the company had to procure an old Mac just so we could compile. Once I got Xcode set up, I learn that I need to connect to an iPhone as a target device in order to build. Thank god for small companies and being able to get things done quick. Another hoop and painful 30-40 minute compile times later (for a relatively small app mind you, also caching didn't seem to help whatsoever cause even back to back compiles were still slow as hell), we finally get out a build out on TestFlight, only to wait an undisclosed amount of time for Apple's approval.

I realize these aren't issues if you're already drunk on the Apple Kool-aid and have the latest Mac with the latest iPhone. Then these barely seem like hurdles, but to someone who hasn't already sold their soul to Apple, publishing an iOS app should not be this difficult.

phreack2• 5 years ago

The reason is of course money. The profit per user on the Apple garden is light years beyond any other platform. I've seen the exact same app make 100 times as much money on iOS than on Android with half as many users.

snyp• 5 years ago

Building reactnative apps is time consuming because of the library and it’s dependencies. Native compile times are much faster.

tomduncalf• 5 years ago

Can confirm this is true, however you should find that subsequent compiles are much quicker unless you’re doing something unusual.

If you’re just changing JavaScript it should be more or less instant (you may not even need to recompile, hit R in the packager console or use hot reloading). If you add a new native dependency or change some native code, it will have to recompile any affected parts of the code but you should still see much quicker compile times than from a clean state.

raphaelrk• 5 years ago

I find building react native apps much faster than building native apps. You don't need to recompile if you're just changing the javascript, and only a couple weeks out of the year have I actually needed to change any native code.

kelnos• 5 years ago

Well:

Anywho, that’s Apple for you. Why am I still an iOS developer? I dunno, I got bills to pay.

People will chase the money. Even with the onerous review process and 30% cut, there's still a good amount of money to be made on the App Store.

This is the standard collective action problem: if a significant chunk of iOS app developers just said "that's enough, we're not working on this anymore" (and if legions of other developers didn't surge in to replace them), then you better believe things would change. But no one wants to stick out, and most software developers seem to think they're too good for a union.

Ygg2• 5 years ago

software developers seem to think they're too good for a union.

Unionizing in global workforce is a fool's errand. Especially when authoritarian governments exist.

Even if there was an IT worker's International, some asshole in e.g. North Korea can prevent IT workers joining on pain of death.

Or outlaw it. Or deem it a terrorist hacker collective.

JimDabell5• 5 years ago

I need to connect to an iPhone as a target device in order to build.

This is not correct. You can build just fine without any iOS device.

djrockstar12• 5 years ago

Alright, I looked around and finally came across this StackOverflow answer[0] that supports your point. Turns out, if you use let Xcode handle code signing for you, you need a physical device for it to target (which is what we were doing), however there also exists an option to manually sign code yourself, in which case you wouldn't need a physical device. Thanks for the correction, I'm glad to be wrong!

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/58920415

Arainach• 5 years ago

I agree. It speaks to the powerful draw of a (comparatively) affluent user base that people put up with it. Apple's remarkably hostile in their entire ecosystem. I wrote a web page which for some reason doesn't work in Safari. I spent an hour investigating, but since Apple won't even let me run their browser without spending thousands on hardware it's just not worth it to me to bother looking into it. Closed as won't fix, tell your OEM to be less of a pain.

throwaway984393• 5 years ago

A good percentage of resolving App Store problems for big companies is somebody at the submitting company calling up somebody they know at Apple high enough on the food chain who will unblock things personally. That and the business implications of a public complaint ("will Apple retaliate against us?") are why you see blog posts from individuals about App Store problems and not from big companies.

You would think if you make Apple several million dollars that they'd give you a dedicated account rep or something (like AWS, or nearly any other large managed service company does). Newp. $1 or a million dollars, you're all the same to The Big A.

suction2• 5 years ago

Does Tumblr have to be an app for any non-marketing reason?

If your website allows upload of porn, let it live in on the free internet as long as we still have it and don't waste resources on making it an "app". Problem solved. If that eats into your returns in a significant way, you don't have a viable business model.

travisd• 5 years ago

If that eats into your returns in a significant way, you don't have a viable business model

A viable business model is one where, by definition, consumers will purchase your thing at levels that are sustainable. People use apps more than they use web browsers for the most part. Tumblr has to build what people want.

suction2• 5 years ago

...or what people think they want...

vulvahalla• 5 years ago

I made a satire game about Trump a few years ago. It got banned so many times from the AppStore and I had to write in long messages explaining how they are imposing their wrong interpretations onto my work and it took several weeks of messaging back and forth with them until they understood. They forced me to remove content from the app that I saw on Twitter using the iOS Twitter app. They did not force Twitter to remove the content. They banned my game for being pornographic because one of the mini games was called ‘Make Ivanka come’ but in the game you just had to call Ivanka to the president’s desk to get professional advice. The purpose of this obviously being satire to remind people how screwed up things are. Banning satire is like 1984, but banning porn also is in my opinion. At the same time the BBC runs reports about kids using Instagram to sell drugs which can cause actual harm. How can this be?

artpi6• 5 years ago

Another Tumblr dev here:

That's not even going into the monetization pieces. As we are implementing tipping and multi-merchant subscriptions in Post+, we still have to use In-App-Purchases with it's severely lacking API.

The hoops we have to go through to get money from our App Store account to merchants are insane. We are using Stripe Connect infrastructure and Payouts API to do that, and that would be totally fine, as well as taking the fee hit.

The most insane thing is that the subscriber can be in a number of countries, where Apple fees differ (as they contain tax). But the webhook does not contain this information, so we had to reverse engineer the whole Apple pricing matrix and the fee calculation for each subscriber to know what portion to forward onto the Stripe account, and so on and so on.

It's been a ride.

cblconfederate4• 5 years ago

Why do you deal with the app store and don't focus on web-only

artpi6• 5 years ago

Many, many users expect every single thing to be an app

idrisser• 5 years ago

Someone should really focus on building a trusted jailbreak solution so we (and not apple or google) can decide what we install on our $1,000 phones. Anyone knows a project working on this?

IiydAbITMvJkqKf• 5 years ago

android + alternative store (f-droid or something else)

heavyset_go5• 5 years ago

If you start distributing a jailbreak, Apple will patch it. If you sell it to an organization that buys exploits, you can enjoy your exploit indefinitely and make a nice chunk of change on top of it. Apple benefits from this dynamic greatly, as their App Store revenue is more important to them than their uses' security. They incentivize hoarding potential jailbreak exploits and selling them to the highest, and most likely malicious and deadly, bidders, instead of sharing them with users to increase their freedoms.

ankit219• 5 years ago

Anywhere there are humans involved, there are bound to be multiple interpretations of the same words. This becomes a problem when you put humans in positions where if they do their job well, there is no upside, but screwing up has a large downside. Most Apple Reviewers work keeping that in mind. Some are strict, others are not, and the chances are when you are matched with a random reviewer, your app would always be reviewed differently. This has downsides, but this reduces bias and malice (and keeps just incompetency in the process) and this is a better system than one where you are stuck with one reviewer throughout. (imagine being assigned the most anal reviewer possible)

Regarding the 30% cut and the review process, of course it does not make me happy as a developer. As a user though, I can give an iphone to my parents knowing full well that they would not be scammed or be enticed into downloading really shady apps. This has happened on android where they would just give away every permission, and had lock screen controlled by a totally useless app. I would not risk giving them free access to android again, no matter how much time it takes for them to get used to iPhone.

Review process is important in that regard, and if a bunch of devs like me need to pay to fund that, I am happy with that given what it results in on the consumer side. The 30% tax needs to be for infinitely reproducible digital goods - like items in fortnite where a new purchase in db entry - vs scare digital goods like an one time only online session by someone. The other alternative means it's contingent on me as a dev to build trust to get payments and this is where I would always lose out to big brands anyway. Wish there was a better way, but have no suggestions as to how.

go_prodev• 5 years ago

It appears that the apple tax and review process is a constant problem for iOS developers (according to many linked articles on HN)

If it genuinely is a big problem, why don't the apps band together and advertise the problem to their users? I'm guessing many users don't know/care right now, but might pay attention if the app they love suddenly pulls the plug on iOS.

Edit: like a union

smoldesu6• 5 years ago

They are advertising it, that's what this is. They're just not in a position to bargain though; Apple has proven time-after-time that they won't make changes to their policy unless faced with significant legal backlash. If you're a big developer, pulling iOS support would threaten your userbase and create a vacuum for lookalikes to take over your place, which is especially bad considering how Apple has no policy for curating "clone" apps. If you're a small developer, you're basically shooting yourself in the foot by not offering cross-platform support of your content, and losing out on a chunk of the revenue that you need to continue development. It's a catch-22, and a fairly well-engineered one at that.

Apple won't care about this unless legislators do. They defended their 30% cut as a necessary and inexorable part of the App Store experience until the Epic case, where they announced that actually they can make do with 15%, and maintain the same level of quality. I think we're forgetting how much of a bargaining chip Epic had, too; Fortnite, at it's apex, could not convince Apple to bend their rules regarding app distribution.

The only solution here is sideloading, the only question is how long it's going to take before the government lays down the law.

heavyset_go5• 5 years ago

If it genuinely is a big problem, why don't the apps band together and advertise the problem to their users?

Apple abuses their market position in order to leverage a chilling effect on talking about their abuses at all.

From[1]:

If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

axiosgunnar• 5 years ago

Interesting article, basically it boils down to "if your business model requires you to have an App in an App Store, your decades worth of work are at the whim of Big Tech". Same with Google banning accounts etc.

Divesting from Big Tech is the only solution. Don't write Apps, don't use AWS, etc.

akudha• 5 years ago

The old man in me thinks why bother participating in the App Store shenanigans at all in the first place? Why take all the stress? Just make something for the open web and enjoy life.

But, if no one speaks up, then the situation is going to only get worse. We don’t have a choice today, as Android ecosystem is worse than iOS. So here we are, almost 2022, still fighting extremely arrogant companies and walled gardens.

I really wish projects like pinephone etc take off.

kevincox• 5 years ago

Personally I don't and just release web apps. But if I was a for-profit company you can likely attract more customers by releasing an iOS app. Unfortunately the costs of complying with their policies are lower than the profit available.

On the other hand I don't see why users are happy to let Apple dictate which apps they are allowed to install. But as long as users are satisfied with that I understand why companies put up with it.

tommek40773• 5 years ago

Maybe we shouldn't create an app for every website?

smoldesu6• 5 years ago

Maybe Apple should improve PWA support so that could be a reality instead of a pipe dream.

tommek40773• 5 years ago

Because you need a pwa for a blog website?!

protomyth• 5 years ago

The App Store should have a blanket exception for any app that shows user content. The hypocrisy of shipping Safari, Mail, and every Stream Movie App is astounding. I do not want a company with fake morality determining what my morals should be.

At this point we need a new set of laws to govern the openness of app stores.

makecheck• 5 years ago

Back when they had a developer survey, one of my feedbacks was essentially to get rid of App Review completely: not to try to fix it or reduce it but to literally shut the entire thing down. It really is that useless.

SergeAx• 5 years ago

In the case of Tumblr, this would be a reviewer going to search, typing in something like 'tits’ and finding porn.

I just don't get it. With the current state of image processing ML hacking together an NSFW detecting horizontally scalable service is a question of days.

Then you just have to mark all your NSFW content by a flag in a database and stop showing it to iOS devices. That will make people think a bit next time when they choose a new mobile phone.

jarek83• 5 years ago

How come any internet browser can get past the 'porn' policy since all of them will show porn when you type 'porn'?

LexGray• 5 years ago

All the default engines are set to “moderate” by default. “Porn” does not show anything immediately explicit. A tiny hurdle, but still a hurdle and that is enough for many people to rethink. Tumbler you could by default get horrific images in search results.

A Tumblr developer on the App Store approval process

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