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Comment by zapita | Hacker News Reader

Presumably Telegram doesn't know for sure why Apple is blocking updates... They are most likely getting stonewalled, with Apple not responding to any of their requests for information.

Telegram suspects that Apple is trying to appease Russian censors while keeping a low profile and plausible deniability. Perhaps Apple is buying time and showing goodwill to Russia while they negotiate a deal - who knows?

Acting on their suspicion, Telegram makes this announcement, putting pressure on Apple to unblock updates, or at least to stop stonewalling them.

It's a clever use of PR as a tactical weapon. And assuming that Apple was indeed stonewalling Telegram (extremely likely knowing Apple), I think it's perfectly justified.

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Your assumptions are probably wrong. Most likely Telegram does know why they're being blocked, they just aren't saying because they want people to assume malfeasance on Apple's part and they're hoping bad PR will convince Apple to approve whatever it is that they're currently rejecting.

You might be right... I think it's fair to say we're both guessing.

To me it just doesn't seem logical to resort to such a "nuclear option" over a review disagreement, instead of just complying, negotiating, or at least working around the problem in a creative technical way. It's not like Telegram is changing in some fundamental way since the last review... What could Apple be telling Telegram that is such a massive showstopper?

A lot of companies do tend to reach for the "nuclear option" of crying to the press when getting rejected even though they haven't yet gone through all the steps of trying to resolve the issue privately.

> What could Apple be telling Telegram that is such a massive showstopper?

Good question. I don't know. There are a lot of possibilities here and it's impossible for us to know what without Telegram telling us the actual rejection reason.

> > What could Apple be telling Telegram that is such a massive showstopper?

> Good question. I don't know. There are a lot of possibilities here

I can't think of any. Can you name one?

Telegram wants to introduce a feature where they request access to your address book, request access to your photo library, search your photo library using CoreML for photos that appear to be indecent, and start sending them to all of your contacts. Telegram is really adamant that this is an excellent feature and they refuse to remove it when Apple denies them over it.

Or probably something else. But you get the idea. Telegram could have tried to introduce behavior that violated Apple rules. Or they could have snuck existing rules violations past Apple in the past and Apple finally noticed.

Then Apple could tell the real reason.

Apple doesn't usually comment on cases like this.

Looks like a good point to start commenting.

The people who would stop buying iphones over this were never buying iphones to begin with.

I’m pretty sure Apple communicates with the developers of major apps in a different manner. Like when they didn’t immediately deleted Uber that was tracking the permanent device IDs which is prohibited by the platform. They’d delete any regular app that tried to do that.

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