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Comment by plorkyeran | Hacker News Reader

They do not ban you for removing some uses of private APIs, but missing others and resubmitting. In the last decade of this being the policy on the iOS app store they've been quite consistent about only banning people who very clearly are deliberately trying to sneak things in.

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> They do not ban you for removing some uses of private APIs, but missing others and resubmitting.

Maybe not -- maybe you know something about how Apple operates. But clearly they ARE sending responses threatening to do exactly that.

> maybe you know something about how Apple operates

Anecdotally, I have never heard of this happening in non-malicious cases, ever. And I know a couple hundred Mac and iOS developers who would raise a lot of noise if this did happen, so I'm inclined to believe that it doesn't.

Because in the past, developers have obfuscated their use of private APIs rather than removing them. They are threatening to ban people who abuse the platform. They aren't going to ban anyone making an honest effort to eliminate their use of private APIs.

Where as on Windows there is no such issue.

There's no issue here for a Mac either (this was for a submission for a macOS program). The problem was when submitting it to the Mac App Store.

Yep - instead, Windows is dragged down by 20-40 years of bug-for-bug API compatibility, even in the things that were never documented as public API and pretty clearly look like internal solutions that the author at Microsoft never designed for public use.

There is a good reason for how Apple approaches use of their private APIs, and for how Microsoft approaches use of their private APIs. Not saying either one is correct, there really is no answer, but consider that for any public API that exists, there may be undocumented details that some software somewhere relies upon whether they realise it or not. Apple is just taking a more aggressive approach than Microsoft here by detecting and disallowing private API use in their store so as to avoid issues down the line.

As far as I know, the Microsoft Store has a similar-sounding check for "unsupported" APIs. I don't know the details though.

[1] https://tedwvc.wordpress.com/2013/07/19/finding-the-kernel32...

[2] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/21805

They can ban you for absolutely any reason whatsoever. They can ban you for using the number "4" in your code.

They don't, though. And we trust them not to, because it is not reasonable behaviour and it would absolutely not make sense for them to do this.

This is the same.

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