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Comment by notadoc | Hacker News Reader

How does garbage like this get through the App Store? I thought Apple was notoriously strict on approvals?

Also, do people still use the App Store? I don't think I have casually browsed for apps in 5 years or more.

Years and years ago when we first launched a video chat room app, they denied it. They said it wasnt allowed to have a listing of rooms. So we simply had the app request a file from our server on app launch. If the file was present, we hid rooms. Once we got approved we just removed the file. We kept that up for a few months but it seemed like after the initial approval apple never bothered to check again so we just abandoned it after that.

What was their reasoning "listing of rooms"? I'm somewhat familiar with the developer guidelines and not familiar with that one.

Be careful, I once got this from Apple (they had misunderstood something about my app)

"Deliberate disregard of the App Store Review Guidelines and attempts to deceive users or undermine the review process is a direct violation of section 3.2(f) of the Apple Developer Program License Agreement. Continuing to violate the Terms & Conditions of the Apple Developer Program will result in the termination of your account, as well as any related or linked accounts, and the removal of all your associated apps from the App Store."

> How does garbage like this get through the App Store

Yes, exactly. How is there no-one at Apple/Google checking the top list of their app stores once a day to weed out all the crap?

All you would have to do is put eyes on any app that charges $400 a month like this scam. That's got to be an absurdly low number of apps.

It frustrating. I tried to get a legit app through the app store that had a link to our website where people could sign up. The iOS app is for customers with accounts, so it made sense to us to have a link where users could see our website (discover our Saas product and sign up). Apple repeatedly rejected it since they wanted their 30% cut of our revenue. So we now have to make it clear in our description that this app if for current customers only.

However, these scamming apps make it through.

The app store guidelines very clearly prohibit what you tried to do, and it's been well-known that this is prohibited for many many years.

If you want to be able to get new users with your app, you need to provide an IAP subscription option.

I was rejected for linking to a THIRD PARTY service that happened to have a paid plan too. Didn't get any revenue from that and couldn't very well offer IAPs even if I wanted to... after being in the store for a year, too. The reviewers are grossly incompetent more often than not.

Doesn't Netflix's app's first screen say sign in or visit Netflix.com to sign up?

They used to do that, and that is ok. But you can't link them to an external site to pay and sign up.

But now they just bit the bullet and give up a portion of their revenue to Apple and Google. Although I believe 30% is only for the first year. It goes down after that.

I suspect a big player like Netflix can negotiate the revenue split with Apple. Nothing we mere mortals can.

The weird thing is why would Apple get any of the revenue. I don't think microsoft gets any from people that watch netflix in their browser, nor google if people watch it in chrome.

In theory either could interfere with your interaction with netflix and demand money to allow it through. Google could start a whitelist of good sites and demand revenue sharing to be allowed on the list but people would go ballistic and firefox would have a lot more users.

I really don't see how apples arrangement is any more acceptable.

What your describing is more like what ISPs will do without net neutrality. Browsers have financial incentives not to do that (e.g. there are well know free alternatives, and it's an important feature of android or windows that you can browse the internet).

Holy shit. I searched this and found [1]. 15% recurring revenue per signup seems like one hell of a commission. But perhaps warranted if it's bringing in people that haven't had Netflix before and legitimately sign up via the app.

1: https://www.macrumors.com/2015/04/13/apple-15-percent-cut-ap...

I don't think they can. Netflix needs Apple more than Apple needs Netflix.

But, if you have existing customers and their account has lapsed and must be paid to re-enable service your app can link to a web-page payment form

I'd imagine there's some companies that even Apple can't bully.

You can get new users through your app, you just have to provide a free version. Then if they want to use the premium features, they can log in on the web and pay. But you can't link them to the site or to an external payment method.

It's completely ridiculous. There's one way to distribute software on the second-largest mobile platform in the world, so we either have to pay whatever cut they shake us down for, or provide a terrible user experience by not even letting users click on a link to using our own subscription backend.

  But I’ve also never clicked on a Google Ad, yet Google somehow rode Adwords to $700 billion dollars today.

> do people still use the App Store

Yes people spend billions of dollars a month on the App Store.

I get the feeling it's very top heavy, with the vast majority coming from in-app purchases of games. Presumably these are the ones advertised relentlessly too.

Maybe they submitted it 100 times before it got approved. With the money at stake, the effort is worth it.

There should be a bad app bounty for stuff like this trash.

I was wondering the same thing.. Maybe the developer was able to remotely flip a switch after the app went through approval to change its behavior and app review didn't catch it? What's really surprising is how long it's been out (almost 2 months)

I can see that by using Microsoft CodePush or similar. But you can't change the description, in app purchases or title without going through the approval process again.

You definitely can the description...

Maybe they used some code push tech similar to what rollout used to update the app after review.

Or they can just have a delay in the app, or have it check a website to see which code path it takes.

Yep. I do wonder if they employed some sort of shady tactic like this or my suggestion to get past app review. What surprising is they were still in the app store after 2 months. Apple usually pulls things pretty quick.

This was my first thought too. How do these apps even make it past review.

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