Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

I haven't been able to trust gmail with anything important after that.

So I'm not sure what 'buying the government' actually would mean or how it would be different...

I want to go online and fill out a long, myers briggs like personality test that judges my political leanings, and then have that data fed to a script that votes on all the issues for me directly, skipping the middlemen. Collectively those scripts would be a far better representation than any human.

Replace all politicians with tiny shell scripts.

Yeah. If we want any semblance of actual freedom left, cash is a part of the future.

A cashless society would mean a society where some neuro-atypical people might periodically have to worry about starving to death.

Same goes for Uber eats etc. Call the restaurant directly, don't be a dick.

Ah, took me a second. You don't mean paper cash in reference to fiat money vs the gold standard. You mean hard cash being replaced by plastic account balances in a sort of cyberpunk vein. Totally agree, great point.

Of course this is also an area that requires government regulation in order to prevent banks from taking advantage of their customers. And that requires a government that actually cares about this sort of thing.

At the moment. All those things can and do change, and then what will you do?

They will then attack your Domain Register, or your DDOS protection (CloudFlare) or ISP (as more residential plan forbid running any server the ISP will ban you not for political or other reasons but for running a server on a residential plan), have your bank account / credit card cancelled (this has happened) etc etc etc

ISPs can ban users just as capriciously as any other company. And they do.

Decentralized internet alternatives are both harder to use (and "host your own infrastructure" is already impossibly hard for the vast majority of people) and too limited to be useful.

It's time to accept that and emergent behavior of the internet is to become more centralized, not less.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-m...

I hope it's not going to be a talk about which commission rate is fair, because it completely misses the point. If apple wants to charge 30% commission for being able to distribute on the store, use their development tools, their apis, and have people pay using apple, fine. But just let my customers free to install my software on the hardware they own the way they want to.

But... Why? Are you not an Android user maybe? Because it didn't make sense to me as an Android user. My default browser is set to Firefox with ublock origin installed. Search backend is still set to Google, but it's pretty easy to switch between providers. You're not forced into anything here

The real issue there is the deep coupling between Google services and Android, removing at least 70% of the phones utility if the phone isn't signed into a Google account.

The same applies to apple devices though, with the added issue that everything else is forced as well. While I'd be glad if Google opened up the services api, that's a very different issue to the one the original discussion was about.

For the majority of users, this is irrelevant because linux is unusable for them. And they are the customers. To have a sustainable business, we have to target the platforms that paying customers use. That platform is not gnu/linux.

I find it amusing that people and businesses are willing to put their future in the hands of a company that has historically destroyed anyone who gets enough users on their platform.

If this is the best option, I think that the best option would be to actively work with a platform competitor. Do developers have a sense of stockholm syndrome ?

Also, for startups, making sure you have an alternative option to distribute your app in case it gets shut down on apple’s store makes it almost a guarantee that they’ll try to deploy on as many different stores as possible.

When your opposition has an absolute chokehold on major markets it's a near unassailable position - throw in that the vast vast majority of users simply don't care whether an app store is open or not or know why they should care - attention is finite and the only way things will improve is if governments lead it and well see my earlier paragraph about who has the money...

All these whinging developers seem to have forgotten that they made an agreement with Apple which included:

"10. Term and Termination. Apple may terminate or suspend you ... at any time in Apple’s sole discretion."

Don't like the terms, don't sign the contract. I learned that the hard way at the age of 19, it wasn't in tech, it was a housing contract, but I learned my lesson:

Before you agree to anything with legal standing, read it and reread it. Understand it, and if you don't seek help to get that understanding. Once you understand the terms you have to make a choice to agree or walk away. Then you have to live with the consequences.

This is the basis of legal justice (as it stands) and much of society relies on it.

Microsoft and other brands are getting better at making quality hardware faster than Apple is innovating in the space.

Apple still has the lead in their os just feeling so much nicer and solid to use but again it's still stagnant while windows is slowly evolving and when it comes down to it you can't even build a mac with the power you're working with on the Windows side so it stops really being an option if one means your work can be done multiple times faster (GPGPU workloads for example) than on the Mac side.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's abhorrent, but it's something you should think about.

I once tried to open a new bank account with my bank of 10y, and set up direct debit to it. The point was that I was going to pay my rent from that new account (both me and a roommate would pay into the account, and a direct-debit would go to the landlord).

I filed the paperwork, in person, and heard nothing, a week passed, I phoned the bank, they said call back tomorrow.

I did, "please call in a week".

Waited a week, "please call back next week"..

So I go in person to the bank, and I refuse to leave until they fix it- I was being pressured by the landlord, I couldn't take the keys of the new property until proof of direct debit was handed over.

I waited for 5hrs in the lobby, basically from a few minutes after the branch opened until the mid-afternoon. Eventually a teller decided to help me because none of the bank managers were going to look at it.

What was the problem? apparently because I had claimed to have an income on one of the forms they wanted proof. I had never been asked to delclare proof before; and bearing in mind that previously I had never declared any income on any account _and_ I had standing orders/direct debits coming from the account; this was also the account that was where my salary landed, the only account I'd had since I was 13.

I tried to give proof, I showed bank statements and payslips... contracts etc; but because the payslips were on my phone they didn't accept them, I asked if I could use a printer and they said no.

So, I walked across the street to Barclays, opened 3 accounts with my passport and a proof-of-address, set up all my direct debits in 1hr, transferred all my money and that was the end of it.

What pissed me off most was the lack of transparency on exactly /why/ they decided not to move forward, expecting me to just sit on my hands forever is not good.

Fuck you HSBC, that was nearly 10 years ago and I still fucking hate you.

er... my point is that corps can be fickle and you shouldn't trust any of them. Especially the ones that implore you to trust them.

And, might I add, Safari performs way better for me than Chrome, on macOS.

When you type your password into your computer, if you do it incorrectly, you get a generic error like "That didn't work, try again". If instead the OS gave out more specific hints, like "Your username is good but your password isn't" and "You tried 9 characters, but your password is not 9 characters", it would only make things easier for the attacker.

That's insane. Their brand must be in the toilet. This guy has a "niche" product that is probably only of interest to a few geeks. A real estate company, on the other hand, has a brand that it needs to protect and project.

Also, I'll bet they will get to interact with the account fraud department, sooner or later.

"Note, however, that apps using TestFlight cannot be distributed to testers in exchange for compensation of any kind, including as a reward for crowd-sourced funding."

If you have taken the time to read the information posted you would see that the information is relevant on monetization outside of the app.

I am just giving possible considerations for the author that they haven't consider in the article, we don't know how the app link has been distributed throughout the last 3 years, maybe they posted a donation link somewhere before and Apple considered this as compensation for the beta distribution of the app.

But from the way it sounds the author was not actively developing the application, so I am not sure how many changes went into each 90 day revision, perhaps Apple does not look kindly on resubmitting a build just for the sake of resetting the TestFlight 90 day activity counter. This might be seen as a way to try and avoid deployment and the final app review process.

The 90 day counter is mentioned here https://testflight.apple.com/ Look for it under "Testing"

From the way I have understood the 90 day counter before is that the app should be updated with new functionality/patches to be more beta tested, otherwise your app is obviously not being developed so no need for beta testing anymore

If we enforced the law as written, I think the "cookie law" would be a net positive for everyone.

In terms of who deals with the anti competitive situation, I don't think that matters. But this is textbook market distortion that traditional antitrust laws were made for, and I think it's high time we saw them used to break up anti-competitive market practices.

It's outrageous, but people rag on Apple disproportionately, as though their model (curated App Store vs free-for-all) is the issue. We need sweeping technology reform from the top. Governments need to start understanding the technology that they oversee, not just dealing on a 'business level' with lobbyists and execs who will do anything to maintain their autonomy.

When these companies are service providers to a majority of the population (in aggregate, or individually) they must be treated as infrastructure providers and held to basic standards of accountability, transparency, and governance.

I agree that Apple’s lack of communication with developers is a massive problem, but I also think there are a couple of gaps in his story that need filling in.

TestFlight betas expire after a short amount of time – one or two months, if I remember correctly. He says the application has been available through TestFlight for three years. This means that he will have had to publish a new build well over a dozen times to keep it active for this amount of time. And if it’s already on TestFlight with external testers, it’s really not much effort at all to push it live. The build is already in Apple’s system – you've got to fill out a couple more form fields and click submit.

So looking at it that way… he gets hundreds of users, keeps pushing new builds to those users on a regular basis for three years, but never submits it to go through the public App Store review process. If I were Apple, I’d think he was probably trying to bypass the review process as well. Apps with a public invitation link are common, but this behaviour is not.

But yes, they should talk to him about it and this is a failure on Apple’s part even if he is acting suspiciously. I’ve been saying for a while that Apple need a VP of Developer Relations to take ownership of this type of thing, because it seems clear nobody owns it at the moment.

1) Desire to cut Apple out of their share by trying to monetize a test app

and/or

2) Desire to escape the review process which might flag and reject an app designed to allow the user to easily fetch data from source that would be in violation of copyright laws.

This is relevant to the political example for a similar reason. Sure, we can say there's nothing wrong with the judge in a politician's criminal trial being seen with the politician in a restaurant after the politician's acquittal.... on the same day (look up Edwin Edwards and you'll see examples of just that), but it certainly does look bad, doesn't it? Similarly we can say that people from the vote counting app and their investors being seen in a bar with the guy responsible for failing to count the votes is not necessarily nefarious, but when the guy who counts the votes fails to count the votes in a way that favors the candidate whose staffers were also at the same get together at the same bar, it sure does look bad, doesn't it?

There's no reason for a guy with a successful app to fail to launch it and monetize it, unless he's trying to skirt Apple's rules in some way. It's just a matter of what way he's trying to game their system, isn't it?