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Comment by heartbreak | Hacker News Reader

The Dash author engaged in unethical practices and then attacked Apple when they closed his account.

http://www.loopinsight.com/2016/10/10/apple-responds-to-dash...

This a most irresponsible post. The situation was somewhat complex and not easy for outsiders to parse out of the crossfire. You state one side's position as fact, quoting only one highly tendentious Gruberish Apple protagonist in support. Is this how fairly you'd like to be treated in public if you got into a spat with a major company? Please have a little thought for the welfare of others before you type.

In any case, it's water long under the bridge now, and Dash is an excellent app used my many developers (including within Apple). Trying to poison the well is in pretty bad taste.

Doesn't seem like a particularly complex case to me.

Facts not up for debate: the developer of Dash enrolled two accounts in the ADP with the same credit card, and these accounts shared at least one test device. One of these accounts participated in obvious fraudulent activity.

Unfortunately, nobody is around to corroborate Bogdan's side of the story. As far as we know, Bogdan made up his supposed relative/friend (ala "I didn't send that embarrassing text to my crush - it was my asshole friend!") to escape blame. And even if his side of the story is true, how is he not partially culpable for the fraud? By enrolling an account with his credit card and giving it to someone else, he enabled them to commit fraud on the App Store. If I buy a gun and give it to my brother and he shoots someone, am I not partially responsible for that outcome?

It's not quite damning enough for me to not use Dash, but it doesn't exactly give me faith in Dash's developer either.

What? That link doesn't have any proof that "the Dash author has engaged in unethical practices". Neither any other link I could find about the whole controversy. Actually, everyone seems to be saying things are complicated, what seemed to be true actually wasn't, it's hard to take sides, etc:

https://daringfireball.net/2016/10/apple_dash_controversy

Gruber makes it pretty clear in your link that the author of Dash engaged in unethical practices, just not with the Dash app (or the account used to publish Dash). Heck, publishing the phone call alone is unethical, regardless of any of the alleged app review behavior.

I think you or the mods should remove your comments because they are potentially defamatory. There is indeed no evidence that the Dash author himself was responsible, he says it was a family member.

“Almost 1,000 fraudulent reviews were detected across two accounts and 25 apps for this developer so we removed their apps and accounts from the App Store,” Apple spokesperson, Tom Neumayr

They’re allegations, sure. I said that in my second comment. But Tom didn’t hedge his words there.

Well, what is clear to me is that another account, not Dash's author's, engaged in unethical practices. The author said it was a family member, but I can't verify that, so it is still unclear.

Publishing the phone call was kinda dumb, yeah, but it's still pretty far from "engaging in unethical practices". It seems more like a guy feeling cornered, acting under pressure and making bad decisions.

Dash is back on the iOS app store[1], so they probably worked out the issue

[1] https://blog.kapeli.com/dash-for-ios-back-on-the-app-store

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