This Is the Mindfulness App Apple Doesn’t Want You to Have | Hacker News Reader

This Is the Mindfulness App Apple Doesn’t Want You to Have

journal.thriveglobal.com

30 pointsmmayberry25 comments

Well, considering how it would be implemented, I doubt "any app designed to help people use their phones less is unacceptable for distribution in the App Store" was the real reason. It sounds more like, "any app indistinguishable from a virus has no place in any app store, anywhere."

>> Google, conversely, has welcomed Space to its mobile marketplace, the Google Play store, Brown says. This is a signal that the search giant is ready to "give people a little more control about how they want their minds to work," he says.

No, it's a signal that Google doesn't care enough about what goes in their app store to review entries before publishing them.

Honestly, I don't care what sort of apps you make. People really should have a choice about what apps they can install. App stores create a barrier to entry for app developers that stifle creativity and expression.

But I also think it's important to tell the truth about why things are happening. This article is a PR campaign. Who even heard of Space before this?

>I doubt "any app designed to help people use their phones less is unacceptable for distribution in the App Store" was the real reason. It sounds more like, "any app indistinguishable from a virus has no place in any app store, anywhere."

I don't disagree that the latter sounds like a more sensible reason to reject the app, but the former is apparently a direct quote from the Apple rep.

I just assumed "A rep from the Apple Store Review reportedly said" meant "a rep from Space told us".

Given that the rest of the explanation is dishonest, there is no reason to believe that this quote is not also a lie.

From the 60 minutes article:

>Ramsay Brown and his garage start-up Dopamine Labs made a habit-breaking app as well. It’s called “Space” and it creates a 12-second delay -- what Brown calls a “moment of Zen” before any social media app launches. In January, he tried to convince Apple to sell it in their App Store.

Somehow I don't think that was why his app was rejected.

Well, according to the second paragraph: "A rep from the Apple Store Review reportedly said that “any app designed to help people use their phones less is unacceptable for distribution in the App Store.”". That's about the whole point of the article: Google doesn't decide for their use how they should use their own phones, whereas Apple kind of tries to.

How does that even work on a system level? iOS apps can't really influence the execution of another...

Space gives you a replacement icon for your time and attention sucks of choice, whether it’s Twitter, Facebook or Snapchat.

OTOH the easiest way to do this would be to have the Space app help to automate creation of Safari shortcuts on the home screen (which would be called Twitter and show the correct icon), which launches a hypothetical page in Safari like https://twitter.space.usedopamine.com which would show the pulsing animation for 12 seconds, before launching the actual Twitter.app.

That's probably it. The Twitter.app, Facebook.app, Snapchat.app, etc. would all still have their own icons, of course. But you could just hide those away in a folder.

What I gathered from the article is that it replaces the icons on your homescreen with its own icons. So you get several Space app icons on your home screen, each one individually configured to launch a different app, but only first after recording that your user engagement is so high that you are indeed willing to put up with a 12 second pause before reading the latest tweets and status updates.

The only way to accomplish that is through a jailbreak or undocumented APIs - probably only a jailbreak.

60 Minutes has been played by the creator of the app.

There are a few workarounds that don't involve undocumented APIs for this, as someone else in this thread mentioned.

Facebook's Groups app uses (disclaimer: as far as I can tell) an interesting technique involving saving data URIs to the home screen and then deep linking them.

This wouldn't be the first time they have been played given whom they've interviewed: a dishonored Nixon, a cadre of tobacco executives, and a bunch of confabulators from the US customs who claimed no drug trafficking between US and Mexico.

It's hard to tell FTA, but from what I can gather it basically acts as a launcher for the social media app of your choice(s?). Pretty basic - you open the app, it does whatever pause mumbo jumbo it wants, then uses a URL scheme to launch twitter/FB/etc.

Exactly - presumably it's either a Jailbreak app or it uses undocumented APIs.

Ok I'm all for a good app store rejection story but this sounds pretty suspect: “any app designed to help people use their phones less is unacceptable for distribution in the App Store.”

It's way more likely because there isn't a public API for changing the application icon on iOS (at least until 10.3 https://developer.apple.com/reference/uikit/uiapplication/28...)

...and even when once there is a public API. It is certainly against app store rules to infringe on the trademarks of popular social network companies for what you use as your icon.

I'm guessing the real reason is that this app is apparently interrupting the function of other apps. Can't blame Apple for wanting to prevent that.

If this is exactly what the user wants, why should Apple be the one to decide?

> A rep from the Apple Store Review reportedly said that “any app designed to help people use their phones less is unacceptable for distribution in the App Store.”

I call BS on this. Apple usually doesn't give you that precise feedback on why an app has been rejected. It seems only PR.

And we should trust you because?

You shouldn't trust anybody on the internet. That said, there are enough cases of devs complaining of an arbitrary and opaque process from Apple that the claim is at least somewhat corroborated.

I like the idea a lot, since i often catch myself opening a new reddit tab right after closing another.

Anyone know of a way to accomplish this on linux?

Or maybe somehow through piehole or a similar system?

Space makes an extension for Chrome as well

"We've developed this app for Amazon that makes people shop and spend less on Amazon" "I can't believe Amazon rejected this"

I'm really not sure why this article got flagged. I'd say that Apple's PR reads Hacker News, too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com