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Comment by nromiun | Hacker News Reader

> The big problem is that when Apple tells you that the reasons “are not limited” the ones they listed, it could be anything. They could call my face ugly and remove me from the Developer Program under that reason and tell me it was because of “fraud”.

<rant>

Seriously, just how hard is it for these companies to communicate properly? Would it kill them to send something like "We saw X on your account so we are closing your account temporarily. Contact us.". Instead it is just "We closed your account. Get screwed.".

This is why so many developers are going the web app way these days. Dealing with a closed platform who won't even talk to you is just infuriating.

Sorry for the rant.

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> Sorry for the rant.

Don't apologize, your rant is valid and unfortunately this issue is not limited to Apple. Google is infamous for closing accounts and sending an automated message along the lines of "You may have violated a rule. We won't tell you which rule, and we won't offer proof, deal with it." They don't just do this to their free users, it's happened to businesses using paid Google services for their core infrastructure. It's maddening that a corporation can get so big that it's effectively a human walking through an ant hill, oblivious to the thousands or even millions of lives it's disrupting in the name of moving forward and making profits.

Not defending, but look at it from the attacker's point of view: The more information the target divulges about their process, the more accurate a playbook you are able to develop about what kinds of attacks the target will and won't allow.

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.

Apple's strategy against the web app workaround appears to be two-pronged: abandon any pretence at maintaining webkit whilst continuing locking out more competent browser engines. Even Microsoft in the IE era didn't actively ban Netscape from running on their platform...

WebKit is clearly being actively maintained, though.

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

> WebKit is clearly being actively maintained, though.

Depends what you call "actively maintained", I would call it on life support personally, it's lacking very far behind the other engines.

How can that possibly be the case if it's becoming more, not less, standards compliant and performant?!

Additionally, it even manages to outperform Blink in certain use cases / benchmarks, especially after the last major update or so.

It might not be Apple's bread and butter like Blink is for Google, but I see no obvious signs of WebKit dying, though I'm open to proof to the contrary.

PWA anybody?

PWA, wepb, fullscreen support, intersection observers... the list is very long. And I'm not counting the basic bugs they never solved.

What's wrong with WebKit's implementation of intersection observers?

I recently lost 2 days troubleshooting an iOS 13 Safari bug: It just froze, when it got certain html. Wasn't possible to connect a debugger. Never seen that in a browser before.

FF, Chrome: all fine, page rendered correctly.

(I had to bisection-comment out half the html page and so on, until I found out what made Safari freeze. The problem: Radio buttons in separate divs but not wrapped in separate forms, killed Safari.)

> Would it kill them to send something like "We saw X on your account ..."

They fear it would kill their fraud prevention efforts because they'd just be giving evil actors a list of instructions on how to stay as close as possible to their undesirable activities.

Unsolvable.

> We saw X on your account so we are closing your account temporarily

There will always be some idiot who goes 'oh so you're descriminating against X' or some other bullshit but legally valid reason and sues them. Can't have that.

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