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Comment by komocode | Hacker News Reader

Title is clickbait and not very objective. Apple isn't "bullying". It sounds like reviewer was convinced a phone number was not needed. That's why you simply reply back to the reviewer or get it appealed.

Reviewers aren't 100% perfect. I've had apps that violated rules pass the review only to be rejected a few updates later. One app I had forced users to use their birthday (at the client's request) as the password. 1.0.0 passed the review, but 1.0.1 was rejected because birthday is not an acceptable form of a password.

Apple could absolutely do better with reviewers, but it's likely they had to lower the quality of reviews in some way to reduce the amount of time it takes to review an app (from 5-7 days to 24 hours). Regardless, I rather take the 24 hour app review time since any rejection can be quickly re-assessed again.

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I would not be complaining online if simply replying back would work. This is the second time we got rejected for that reason. Last time it took a week of back and forth trying to convince reviewers that we need phone number and it doesn't make sense to ask for it later somewhere.

We did get approved eventually, only to get rejected again for the same reason on the next update.

Judging from the screenshots in your tweet, your first rejection was failing to follow the rules that stated if you have a third party sign in, you're supposed to use Sign In with Apple too. That's not on Apple.

Regardless, I don't see how this is Apple trying to "bully" small developers. They're trying to enforce guidelines. That's all.

All of my screenshots are from the second round we went through after trying to remove apple login entirely.

They bully small developers, because big companies like Uber or Grab have the same functionality with zero problems. While when we try to explain that we use phone number for the same reason, Apple insists that we change how our app looks and works.

How do you know Uber and Grab? (Grubhub?) were never rejected? You're assuming they passed every single review which I think it's highly unlikely.

Considering 40% of all submissions in the past week (shown on Apple's website) get rejected, it's entirely possible they were rejected using phone number input and after explaining to Apple their purpose, they were finally accepted. You're bound to get 1 or 2 apps erroneously rejected considering they go through 100k submissions every week.

It also says the app store team takes 1000 calls every week to discuss the rejections. It's not just you or small devs.

Fair enough, although I don't see why the constant rejection and need to explain the same thing to Apple again and again seem like a normal thing to us. Their review process is too rigid and their control over your app updates is too tight, which is why they are now getting bunch of other problems with companies like Epic.

Speaking of Epic, maybe you're right and it's not just small developers.

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