Comment by daanlo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by daanlo | Hacker News Reader

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Imho the app store clearly hinders innovation. In a recent project of ours (corona related) we had to wait over 1 month for Apple to approve our app - never knowing whether they would actually approve it. Google Play rejected it, saying it wouldn‘t allow any corona related apps from parties that are not government entities. As a response we ported everything to a web based solution. While I can understand their aim to keep scammers out (probably mainly to avoid PR issues) it was a real inhibitor to our legit project. For future projects I will always build web first. With the app store/ google play you are at the whim of some person at the other end of a textarea.

If that’s the whole story, that’s not the strongest of arguments. Google rejected it, Apple ¿approved? it (that isn’t clear to me from your writing), but in your opinion took too long. If Apple did approve it, how does that make Apple bad? AFAIK, you’re ou can’t sue companies for being inefficient.

Even if Apple didn’t approve it, the statement “As a response we ported everything to a web based application” seems to imply the amount of “innovation hindering” isn’t that large.

It doesn‘t make Apple bad. It just means they inhibit innovation. The same way that a micro-managing manager that needs to sign-off on everything stops progress, but that doesn‘t make them a bad person. Your argument of porting everything to the web is absolutely valid. We are a small team though and having to rebuild everything for web meant we had to delay our launch - of course this is on us. Also some of our features don‘t work in web, since the native camera libraries are much better, but they aren‘t available on the web in sufficient quality (neither for ios nor android). And some camera functionalities are generally only available to safari on ios. It looks to me as if this is on apple, but may be a chrome/firefox issue.

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