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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

When you signed up for the Apple developer program and accepted the agreement for revenue sharing on the App Store, you've signed away all rights to sue for damages.

Even the basic Developer Program License Agreement includes this language:

"Apple reserves the right to change, suspend, deprecate, limit, or disable access to the Apple Services, or any part thereof, at any time without notice (including revoking entitlements or changing any APIs in the Apple Software that enable access to the Services). In no event will Apple be liable for the removal of or disabling of access to any of the foregoing."

The revenue sharing agreement further reinforces that you can't hold Apple liable for anything.

It's Apple's store and Apple's customers. They display your software in the marketplace and provide cryptographic signing so that end users can install it, but they can stop doing that at any time with no justification needed.

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Not really relevant as this is an example of when you can sign away your rights but I thought I'd just mention that it is impossible to sign away certain protected rights, no matter what a contract says.

A good example is a paid parking lot where it might say something along the lines of "by parking in this lot, you accept that 'parking company' is not liable for any theft, loss or damage of property." however if say a light fitting fell from the ceiling and damaged your car and you were able to prove negligence by the parking company then you may hold them liable for the damage.

Various companies try all kinds of unenforceable contract terms on the basis that the average Joe believes that he has to stick to whatever he agreed to. There was an amusing post on a legal blog where they went around NYC pointing out the hundreds of unenforceable contract terms that we are exposed to everyday.

Do you have source for the "legal blog post"? Would/Might be an interesting read!

I didn't say he'd actually win at suing Apple, just that it was possible to do so.

If OP is in the EU, then that entire clause is null and void and Apple can be held liable.

The OP’s company has a revenue share agreement with Apple where Apple is the service provider who makes OP’s software available to its customers at its discretion.

What’s illegal or unenforceable about this agreement between two corporations?

The part where OP signs away its rights to go to court over the definition of when their software has to be made available.

If Apple was just a random company only running an app store, it'd be different.

But Apple has a monopoly on app stores for iOS and macOS by preinstalling them, similar to Microsoft preinstalling Internet Explorer.

As a result of being the only possible marketplace for these platforms, Apple can't just act at its own discretion.

The anti-trust line of reasoning was debunked a decade ago.

And the fact is that Apple has acted on its own discretion possibly thousands of times when it came to the App Store. In fact they've been doing it since day 1. They have banned pornography, gambling, cryptocurrencies etc and they will continue to ban more in the future.

It's 100% legal and their right.

Also and much simpler, good luck suing Apple.

That's not that bad actually. Apples routinely loses "small" cases [0](recent) [1] (2012, unfortunately seattlerex.com is off)

[0]: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3yadk/apple-sued...

[1]: https://consumerist.com/2012/04/17/seattle-man-victorious-ov...

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