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Comment by spoonjim | Hacker News Reader

I've watched the App Store reviewers try out apps (not in person, from logging) and they do seem to do a pretty thorough job of exercising the functionality.

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That makes me wonder how easy it is to just hide certain features during the review process.

VW should hire this person!

https://github.com/auchenberg/volkswagen

It is actually pretty easy. As long as you don't use any private APIs, you can completely change the behavior of your app after the review by changing server side settings.

Yes, but if they catch you, you’ll get kicked out of the store altogether.

Why? We do it all the times, we ship most of our app behind feature switches and enable them in the future for subsets of users

Right, but you don't know that they're not rejecting it because of your features being disabled. You only now that they didn't reject it.

It depends whether the disabled features break the rules of the App Store, or are fraudulent. Presumably you aren’t doing that.

It is partly an intent issue. If you are attempting to pull one over on Apple by hiding app behavior during review, well, they are not going to be happy about that.

Other folks are also noting that, because humans are sometimes bad at evaluating each others' intent, it is probably a good idea to attempt to make one's intent clear if going this route, lest you annoy the gatekeeper.

It's extremely easy, but it also is extremely easy to get permanently banned if they find out you "switched on" a hidden feature once the app got into production. A permanent ban can be very damaging, so one needs to make sure to be completely legit when it comes to app store submission reviews and app store ratings

I wonder how this works with webviews. Do they expect you to resubmit the same binary if a page displayed in a webview changes?

Isn't that how Fortnite did Project Liberty?

Can confirm. We got the Coinbase iOS app banned for doing this back in the day, when Apple did not allow bitcoin apps (IIRC showing the price was ok, transacting was not). Even after they relaxed their bitcoin restrictions (and calls to the head of app store), they still made us wait out the 12 month ban before reinstating the app.

https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-bitcoin-app-apple-app-stor...

https://venturebeat.com/2014/12/14/bitcoin-wallet-coinbase-n...

I wonder how they confirm this happened. Do they store a video of the review and cross reference on suspicion?

Given that Apple has no oversight at all here, they can do whatever they want. If an app makes it through review, but has forbidden functionality, Apple will just assume that the developer hid that functionality for the review process, and ban them. Doesn't matter if the approval was due to a mistake on the reviewer's part. Apple won't care.

> Apple did not allow bitcoin apps

This is what is wrong with walled gardens, laws should be made by lawmakers, not Apple.

Who said anything about laws? Apple's rules are no different from HN's rules. And for that matter, your house rules. They're arbitrary decisions to the liking of the respective party. They just have to not be against the law themselves. If they are problematic the solution isn't to generically "ban rules" (saying it out loud already hints at the "value" of this proposition) but to change the law to prohibit certain rules.

This is a super naive analogy - HN doesn't serve close to 50% of the US market, nor is it a platform through which billions of dollars transact. If it did very different rules apply, rightfully so, scale matters, market position matters - from Apple profit margins it's obvious they are abusing monopolistic position.

It's only naive because you chose the naive interpretation, based on sentiment and you not understanding the massive difference between laws and a company's rules. Until you understand what they are, and who decides if rules are against the law or not, mentioning "profit", "scale", "market position", and "different rules apply" doesn't get you closer to the point.

I'll take it down a couple of notches to make it easier: HN could serve every user under the Sun and still be entitled to have a (perfectly legal) rule that says "Don't solicit upvotes". No amount of "oh but at their scale" will change that.

Apple, Google, Facebook, etc. or any company actually do not write laws (they lobby and bribe for them but that's a different can of worms). They just write their own rules for their own products and services. Those rules have to be within the law and even if common sense and current evidence may say they break the law, it's up to a judge in an antitrust lawsuit to decide.

Yes, but the point is that Apple doesn't allow you to not accept their house rules and install apps some other way on """your""" device.

Indeed they don't. And yet they're still not laws which is great for us because those rules or practices can be found illegal.

As I tried to explain above, HN is free to have a rule which says "Don't solicit upvotes" but they can't have a rule "Don't talk to women". The simple answer is because no matter what that rule says, tit's not a law, it's just a rule which can be applied only until a judge decides it's against the law.

How do you know those were not automated systems?

Could have been, but then we got rejected for something which would have been hard to detect automatically.

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