Apple Backtracks After Popular Mac App 'Amphetamine' Threatened with Removal
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
* Everything that's on the news, that is.
People on HN are happy to say they agree with Apple banning names like this because it protects their experience and brand.
It's hard to use the iPhone as a status symbol when it's associated with meth
It’s not clear, despite what it appears here, that the Twitter storm actually changed the outcome. This looks more like T1 support made a call that T2 reversed. Not unusual.
If T1 support sometimes has poor judgement, it should be required to internally escalate to T2 before actually making a decision.
For apps with more than a certain number of users, it should require another layer of escalation and approval, including a review of other apps to make sure rules are enforced clearly, fairly, and reasonably.
Finally, non-security removals should have a grace period of 60 to 90 days.
That was the part that seemed especially outrageous to me. 14 days to appeal or make changes, with no guarantee of response time?
Even if he imagined T2 might reverse the decision, hedging his bets by going public was only rational, given the ticking clock.
Apple could have avoided this whole circus with a more reasonable time frame.
It's not unusual and that's the problem. The process is a huge distraction to the developers and produces a great deal of undue stress if T2 is just going to override it.
Perhaps T1 should not have the authority to remove, ban, etc. They can approve all day long but rejections are escalated to T2, at which point T1 must justify the escalation and perhaps allow the developers to respond if T2 finds the escalation warranted.
Even if this Amphetamine App were found to violate ToS and need to be removed or modified, there was no urgency. It wasn't driving droves of people to Meth addiction.
The reality is that we don’t hear about it unless if we have a situation like this.
So I’m not sure how we can draw any conclusions re: Apple vs Indie devs and the whole Goliath vs David aspect of this.
Banning shouldn't be the unilateral decision of a single individual. We've had our App updates rejected numerous times for arbitrary reasons that were approved without change when resubmitted because we got a different reviewer.
Apple's frame of reference is the number of times a T1 made any call.
So let's say they've made hundreds of bad calls. Is that out of thousands of decisions, or millions? Or tens of millions?
If tens of thousands of apps are banned, but only hundreds are banned incorrectly, that doesn't suggest the same thing as if a large percentage of bans are later reversed.
How many Apps are banned after having been approved? I would certainly hope they haven't had to ban thousands, millions or tens of millions of Apps after they had approved them to the store. That would speak to a very big problem with the initial review process that admits an App into the store.
Clever scammers play a long game, and at Apple's scale, they deal with a lot of them.
> pretty soon everyone wants a sit down with Tim Cook
Most managers would (except in extreme circumstances), talk to their employee at least once before raising the topic of being fired.
> This looks more like T1 support made a call that T2 reversed. Not unusual.
Most managers would confer with their boss / HR / etc. before making the decision to fire someone.
Devs should expect the same from Apple.
Respect unfortunately has to be fought for, and going to the press to apply pressure is one channel for that.
The least they can expect is customer service and actual conversation with the people that decide about their livelihoods.
That may not have been the case here, but being forced to rebrand as an indie app developer can be pretty hard on your userbase/potential reach.
Given the fact that Apple had themselves featured the app, ISTM that T1 didn’t even do the most basic diligence before making this call.
I’d say that’s the problem more than anything. It seems like Apple takes a completely stateless approach to things.
It’s as if they have periodic scrubs of the app list based on some middle-manager defined predicate (in this case, “does app name potentially breach ToS?”) and then they do a mail merge of the results, without even looking at any other metric at all.
IMO that’s not remotely good enough.
It would cost Apple almost nothing to add some other predicates like “has app been around for >12 months? Has app previously been featured by Apple? Does app have more than 100K downloads?”.
If any of these are true, app should go to T2 or even T3 before any contact is made with the developer whatsoever.
I mean this is customer support 101. The stress this must have caused the Amphetamine team must have been huge. And for what? A bad user experience and yet another hit to the reputation of the App Store.
People with views opposite to yours post things like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25615692 (beat you by 8 hours!)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25603650 (don't miss the replies)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23729568 (there are hundreds of these...)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23396632 (ok last one)
Same bias, opposite starting point.
I made that statement because I saw the thread the other day about the same topic and all the top posts were people who think any store owner should have a right to remove problematic references to medical drugs. Including many posts about how the person in question should just give in without protest. Because of strong tyranny of the majority effects intrinsic to systems like Hacker News, once an update put the view that the person should "just give in" in a bad light, the slim majority of posters stopped posting and the slim minority of posters who were critical of apple thereafter posted with confidence. The reason you see so many people with differing views is that the community actually has a great diversity in its views, but still has slight biases, which are amplified by the site format, not the fact that everybody who notices these slight biases are bias themselves.
You can not only predict people's politics from what they claim about HN bias, you can predict the level of intensity they feel about it. At scale, it's a mechanistic phenomenon. The question is what's the mechanism. What I call the notice-dislike bias is my attempt to explain the mechanism.
I'd be very interested in any other explanation, but it's not plausible to think that the answer is "one side is good and has good views and sees HN accurately, while the other side is bad and has bad views and sees HN completely the wrong way". Even though the commenters in question all seem to think that.
It's common for people to interpret the above argument as a defense of political centrism, but that's a non sequitur. You can't derive a centrist position or any other political position from what I'm saying here, which is an empirical observation about social psychology on the internet.
> You [Ametaphine] think the world should get behind you and change the corrupt system.
The mocking tone of these naysayers indicates not just acknowledgement of prevailing reality but also an attempt to rationalize their own weakness. By attacking others who dare to stand up, these commenters can comfort themselves about why they're sitting down.
It's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality in action.
I'd like to see some regulation of all app stores that requires a formal appeals process for decisions to ban existing apps that also mandates that the app stays in the store until the appeal is resolved.
It sounds like this was resolved through the appeals process and may have had the same outcome regardless.
Unlike some other controversial cases, this one did seem like a basic misunderstanding on Apple's part (specifically the reviewer/reviewers), and not a tricky judgement call.
The social media probably didn't hurt though, because the OP was professional and persuasive.
What an awful platform.
Also, Government regulation of app stores would be fatal for software freedom.
If you want to guarantee that the Apple App Store is never assailed by a competitor, your suggestion is a good one.
The pedantry of HN really is tiresome sometimes.
Without that, you’re just making up an assumption based on nothing.
Or a report from the developer detailing their interactions might tell us.
There isn’t guaranteed to be evidence, but there obviously could be.
The absence of evidence is clearly not justification for your interpretation.
At best you can say media pressure may have been an influence.
Asserting that it is the cause, is simply faulty logic.
My typical experience of stupid Apple rejections is this:
1. Stupid rejection.
2. File appeal.
3. The appeal result is to approve the application
In this case, it went like this:
1. Stupid rejection.
2. File appeal.
3. Don’t wait for the appeal result.
4. Run to the press.
5. The appeal result is to approve the application.
There’s no indication 3 & 4 were necessary here. This seems like a trigger-happy reviewer whose decision was always going to be reversed.
Apple has relented on similar cases after getting a lot of bad press so it’s a reasonable hypothesis that they do care about looking bad in public.
The only recent relenting involving the press that I am aware of is ‘Hey!’, which required Basecamp to implement a feature to conform to Apple’s rules.
Do you not think it's strange you had to go through this process multiple times in 6 months?
Split them into a hardware company, an OS company, an app store company, and an applications company, and permanently forbid those companies from collaborating or moving into new markets.
Apple is not a monopoly and has not been anticompetitive by any historic or contemporary legal definition. So no, it won’t get broken up any time soon.
You might see markers get regulated (eg. Mobile app stores) but that’s not antitrust, that’s legislation.
Well then I'm glad you're not in charge.
The best thing about my Mac is how well integrated the OS is with the hardware.
And from there how well the applications, which are well-integrated with the hardware, work alongside the corresponding applications on my iPhone.
Making it illegal to be successful and give customers what they want sure seems to to be a winning economy policy?
Also I have noticed this narrative increasing online. A size-able company/mega corp does something the public assumes is done with malice and the ONLY solution is to "break up" the company. I think this narrative is misguided.
It is also a case of disrespecting long term business relationships. It is one thing to demand name changes or functionality changes from a new product. It is quite another to do it with a long term partner. And these sort of things could be very, very easily avoided dimply by a few rules, may a few lines of code and more respectful and mature communication in these corner cases.
Sometimes Apple's design is so stuck in the 90s that I have a hard time wrapping my head around it.
As a teacher, I was often in situations where a lesson would go on for a while with no computer interaction, and another teacher recommended Amphetamine. It worked well and I never discovered the shell command. I actually tried for a bit and never discovered a GUI option. Do you have a link handy?
Select either Battery or Power Adapter to make changes to how the system will go to sleep/turn the display off after a certain amount of time.
I don't doubt it has its uses, but is it really OS functionality?
I suspect the defaults cover 90% of cases and System Prefs/caffinate cover maybe 90% of what's left.
Example: Closed-lid Macbooks with external display will go to sleep without this tool.
Closed-lid + External Monitor + Power Supply = awake
Closed-lid + External Monitor + Battery = sleep
Closed-lid + External Monitor + Battery + Amphetamine = awakeThis is what happens currently in FF:
https://pengaru.com/~vc/tmp/twitter.png
Maybe they've stopped supporting my version of FireFox on Linux, and I've wrongly assumed it's strictly the lack of js? I'm not sure if that's any better... since this browser is perfectly capable of everything needed to view tweets.
Was there an HN thread regarding this change that I missed?
The app name is problematic if you're a bit puritanical about naming or saying certain things that are edgy, which infects most US megacorps such as Twitter, Facebook et al. I've been on the end of this because they force their puritanical cultural US standards across the world. For example, in a pub, in Scotland, I can quite comfortably tell someone to "go fuck themselves", or "don't be a cunt". The way we use language and profanity is not the same, intent-wise, as whatever internal guidelines Jack, Mark and friends arrived at from a US interpretation. Using language such as this as a Scot on Twitter, between Scots, will get you a suspension.
Personally I think it's a daft name, and couldn't recommend anyway. Not because I'm puritanical, but because it's just trying to be provocative. It's up there with GIMP which is a challenge to talk about in any human company without people sniggering.
It's Apple's store, you bought into it, you play by their Puritan corporate rules.
And sure I could stop using Twitter, FB et al, but I don't have a livelihood to protect by needing to being on these things.
Amphetamine is not an illegal drug in the US. It is available by prescription. Does Apple's statement mean illegal in any jurisdiction in any country? If the app was named something like "methamphetamine" (a different drug, illegal in the US) then Apple might have grounds to remove it under their policy.
I hate to "uhm, ackshully" this thread, but methamphetamine is also available on prescription in the US as Desoxyn: https://www.rxlist.com/desoxyn-drug.htm - because of that the DEA can only list Meth as Schedule II (i.e. drugs with proven-harm, but also proven medicinal use), whereas Schedule I is for drugs that the DEA claim are harmful and have no medicinal use - and don't ask why they put Cannabis on Schedule I... but it strongly hints that their classification scheme is not evidence-based...).
</sidetrack>
Amphetamines are literally medication. Its negative connotation are purely a result of older generations freaking out and trying to control a future they inevitably will have no part of.
Why do we accept the fantasies of these old fanatics, who are demonstrably clueless about the most basic mechanisms of human society?
The media blitz worked. Giving up would be bad advice. Making social media posts, that go viral, fixed the problem.
Now it's valid 99.99985% of the time.
PR damage is a big deal, and companies back down all the time, in situations like this, where they don't actually lose much by backing down.
Maybe a couple won't back from some system wide policy, that is some large initiative of the company.
But, if we are talking about a situation where some rando, singular app or user or whatever, gets blocked/banned/whatever, due to an ambiguous policy, likely made by a singular low level moderation employee? Yeah, absolutely a company could be willing to back down from such an insignificant decision, if the alternative is suffering bad PR.
If Apple keeps this up, the developers will leave, and then you'll have nothing to rabidly fanboy over.
The name of the application seems appropriate for addressing common problmens described in ways like, > “sleep behavior [..] affecting several of my operations, I have been trying to use caffeinate ..”