This is a perfect example of why Sign in with Apple is so great: it hides my e-mail and real name from people like the author who are clearly intent on using this information to sell me stuff I don't want.
But yes, Apple is great. Again, Apple is great. Apple good, good good good
To this date. Tomorrow, though, no one knows.
> I have sent 0 marketing emails trying to sell stuff.
"I", "I", "I". It's not you. It's me. I don't care what you say you're going to do with it. I don't want to give you my email address to store in another database. I'm sure you're very nice, but sorry not sorry.
> The only reason email is needed is for password recovery
You don't need my email at all if I can use Apple ID.
The fourth sentence on the page says "sending personalized emails" as if it's no big deal. I don't care what you think the purpose or value of your emails is. I don't want emails from any app unless it's a support response to an email I sent first.
I do need them for everyone else who comes from traditional signup
However, you seem to have missed the point. My problem is not AppleID, my problem is that Apple forced it on my app and threatened to shut me down if I didn't include it
They want you to redesign your app so that you don’t rely more n mail to provide functionality. It’s a good thing, even for you.
I am an Apple customer as much as an iPhone user is. But Apple chooses to treat me as an employee, after having charged me (and paid me nothing). Do I have the right to be upset? Could they not have sweetened AppleID by encouraging users to ask devs to implement it or even by reducing our dev annual fee by some $? I think it would also have worked
1 dev subscription 4 iPhones to test 2 iPads to test 2 macs to develop
Why do you get to "expect" things from me, and why does Apple get to force me to serve you in a certain way that keeps changing over time and then threatens to hide my work if I don't comply?
I don't know, it just doesn't seem fair. I am happy to work for free because I like what I do, but then being told to do things or risk being banned is just too much for my taste
I think I will just leave the App Store when my web version is finished. Too much trouble for nothing
The average apple customer values consistency and is far less tolerant of deviations from that than the average microsoft or google customer. The whole point in paying more for apple is because we value order, predictability and consistency.
Windows customers are not used to that. Windows Hello may be a good thing for them, but they don't expect the same degree of consistency, if your windows Application doesn't use it, they don't complain, this is life.
But apple customers, like you it or not, expect IOS features to be widely available on IOS applications. We literally pay for that, and as there are vastly more consumers like me, than developers like, it doesn't matter if we bought half the hardware you buy, because as a customer class, end users absolutely dwarf developers.
I completely understand your personal frustration. But this is on you, your choices of providing your work for free deliberately.
Most customers don't want to be back on the situation where you either choose between facebook login or tedious manual account creation, just because it will inconvenience some developers. The whole, raw point is exactly that. It may sound cruel, but we WANT you to be forced to implement stuff that is consistent with IOS guidelines, best practices or even features. Customers can be cruel like that.
I know it's frustrating for you, but this is the core of why Apple users stick to Apple. They decided to trust and share their data with one single company (Apple) instead of an overwhelming amount of small companies.
And it's not just about data; Apple users trust Apple to design a competiting device and a refined user experience and they don't have to do the work for themselves. They just buy the next Apple device and they trust Apple to do the work for them.
I know it's not for everyone, but if a subset of people like it and they decide to buy into it.... why are people getting mad? Apple is the result of what Apple users want. If you don't like them you can develop your app for Android users or whatever else you like.
As an Apple user I'm not happy they forced this. It's manipulative forcing even more platform lock-in for the average joe which empowers other anti-trust practices too.
You're argument that an Apple user is happy at the point of use doesn't justify anti-trust behaviour which is to the overall detriment of people.
Apple seem to get away with far too much just because they're 'Apple'.
Imagine the mess we would be in if every auth provider had the same policy.
But this is not something you can blame on Apple. You need to go to your politicians. You can't expect a company to self-regulate its dominance position.
In general I believe a much better way of dealing with this form of dominance is taxing the dominant companies agressively and use that money to fund open source competition.
X, Y, Z could be Apple, AppleID, and iPhone or Microsoft, Internet Explorer, and Windows.
Microsoft received a $611 fine in the EU for abusing it's Monopoly of control with Windows back in 2004 but it took many years to get there.
As an Apply user I'm quite happy that they keep devs on their toes. The industry as a whole went super user-hostile. Forced updates in Docker unless you pay, other apps doing bait-and-switch all the time.
Apply is like an island with cool shade from trees in the ocean filled with hungry sharks.
Are there any statistics on this? Apple never asked me if I wanted or liked the AppleID experience.
When AppleID came out, I thought it only worked on Apple devices so my use was limited to non-cross platform applications. With developers removing AppleID from Android applications, my initial misperception turned out to be justified.
I would still be happy they tried even if something like AppleID would turn out to be a bad idea, provided enough of these efforts turn into something valuable to me.
My understanding is that Apple only force you to include this if you provide other third-party login options.
This is a consumer-friendly feature that Apple is forcing you to implement so that your users on Apple platforms can choose to use your app's one-click third party login functionality whist still retaining control about what personal data they share with you.
Apple's platforms require a variety of consumer- and privacy-friendly features from developers who choose to release apps on them, and you could make your same argument against any of them (e.g. not tracking the user without their permission)
That Apple does this and holds third-party developers to standards for privacy and consumer-friendliness is why I (and many others) use their platforms.
The tone of your whole piece is sophomoric- you essentially suggest that all of Apple’s customers are uninformed and lacking agency (unlike you).
All of this because you could no longer automatically glom some people’s emails for whatever future use you dream up? I hope you realize how you’re coming off.
Frankly, I wouldn’t be keen on you having my email. You might accuse me of “sitting on my butt” or worse if you decide I’m not a good customer or whatever.
Please replace every mention of "Apple user" with "Apple". It really is the only wrong party here
Now you CAN choose to say, "I don't want those users", if they do not fit into your grand plan of things.
Apple does forward emails, so you can even contact those users for your password recovery use case you mentioned in other comments. I think your problem is not the fact that you do not have an email ID, your problem is, your users have the option of pulling the carpet from under you.
>To this date, I have sent 0 marketing emails trying to sell stuff. Heck, I don't even try to sell anything, I develop out of love and passion. The only reason email is needed is for password recovery
And your other reply in the thread:
>Frankly, I couldn't care less about whether you trust the app or not The fact is, I send 0 emails and privacy and security are top priorities. [...] TBH I am a bit tired of people trusting big tech so much.
Some constructive criticism about your replies... You come across as tone deaf.
Trust is not granted to you just because _you_ self-report that you're honest. Your comments will be perceived as another variation of, "Hey trust me, I'm an honest guy! Really!"
If you're tired of people "trusting big tech" so much, why would that have anything to do with you being "small tech" (e.g. Javier Antons's small company Collaborative Groups)?
The implicit cognitive consumer heuristic is not "He's a small unknown company -- therefore I trust him _more_ with my email address than a big company like Apple Inc."
You're focused more on your needs from a perspective of a developer instead of a perspective of an untrusting user.
That said, you definitely should remove Apple as an option if they make life as a developer not worth the time.
EDIT to add a link that may help your public relations strategy:
Fyi... your insistence on being perceived as trustworthy is a form of "countersignaling" and it makes people distrust your app. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersignaling
> Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for, in plain English, and repeatedly. That’s what it means. I’m an optimist, I believe people are smart. And some people want to share more data than other people do. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you’re going to do with their data. That’s what we think.
Some Apple users may not have cared as much about privacy until Cambridge Analytica and related issues, but it’s always been talked about at Apple.
I’d rather just trust one party, and have a single entity to complain to.
EDIT: Can someone explain how this is wrong?
And to be clear, Apple's policy does not require all apps to support Apple ID - only those which support another SSO solution like Google's or Facebook's. A malicious dev who wants to collect user data has no incentive to support SSOs in the first place. By not supporting SSOs, they can still collect user emails and abuse them however they'd like.
Apples solution of an anonymous email breaks this personalized tracking which is good for privacy concerned users but potentially “harmful” for app developers, particularly those that are ad supported.
There are many who wouldn’t see the value in adding Apple Auth and may actually see it as harmful to their businesses model and chose not to implement it which would deprive users of that choice.
This isn’t about a large section of app developers who just use social auth in a benign way, like the author, to ease app sign ups it’a about those that use social auth more insidiously to track users, frequently without their knowledge.
There’s not a feasible way for Apple to enforce this selectively so used a heavy hand. I feel for author with respect to the button guidelines but as a privacy minded user I’m glad he’s being forced to add the option.
However, Apple's policy gives malicious devs an obvious way out: just don't support any SSO solutions. So this policy doesn't really do anything to stop malicious devs at the end of the day. It stops them from taking advantage of alternative SSOs, but I wouldn't expect that to have much effect.
I guess maybe the policy is intended to mitigate the potential damage caused by negligent devs? As in devs who are not malicious, but risk allowing malicious actors to access user data through negligent design? That feels more like stretch to me, though.
No more giving Camera permission to an app just because it supports sharing photos, which you know you never want to do, or whatever.
(Yes, this was possible beforehand by manually refusing specific permissions after granting all, or vice versa. But it could be unpredictable and cause app crashes etc.)
Where was that made clear? My best guess is when the author said:
> We are denied customer interaction, freedom to offer any non-Apple payment methods, etc. For example, I am absolutely sure that Groups would have had loads of more IAPs had I been allowed to offer Paypal on top of Apple Pay and what not.
Offering a non-Apple payment method is selling you stuff you don't want?
The post appears to be a thinly veiled attempt to cajole people into giving app developers access to their email inboxes as a general rule by throwing insults at Apple for daring to hide email addresses from app developers. Even if this person never tries to sell me things, that rule is clearly meant to enable other people to do so.
It frames "sending personalized emails" as though:
1) The only reason to send personalized emails is for "offering alternative payment methods".
2) Sending personalized emails is no big deal.
But both of those are wrong.
Now seriously, I have said time and time again that I have no issues with Apple ID. I have a problem with how Apple forced it on me. Not nice
Every single point you bring up is about you and not your users. All of your complaints in your post and in your comments in this thread ignore the fact that what Apple is doing is better for the humans on the other side from you.
And your stinger at the end?
> Apple users who logged into Groups via the app with Apple ID will need to create a second account. Am I hurting myself? Am I shooting myself in the foot? Probably. But this is war.
You're not hurting Apple. At best you're hurting your users, but you're so focused on your own petty brigade that you don't see it or care. The war that you've just started is not against Apple but against the human users using Apple devices. They're the ones who would suffer from your decisions.
Making the button uniform across domains so that it's instantly recognizeable is user-positive.
Offering Apple ID as a sign-up option instead of making me give you my email address is user-positive.
If you don't care about being user-positive, if you're going to vociferously argue against it, why should users trust you?
But it is the only way I can shed light on Apple's behavior. I promise to add a transition mechanism, happy? I will still make sure users get to read some "Apple bad" message to highlight the reason behind Apple ID not being straightforward on the web
It still sounds like Apple's behavior is 100% good for users and your behavior is not. You wanting to circumvent things that are positive for users makes you as a developer look extremely bad (user-hostile). I don't know what else I can say if you don't want to hear it.
I'm a user and I wouldn't touch "signin with Apple" with a 10 foot pole. That's waaaay too much lock-in.
For Apple device owners there's significant upside and little-to-no downside. You not wanting to use it doesn't mean that it isn't 100% good for Apple device users.
> That's waaaay too much lock-in.
If the app developer cared, they'd give you a way to migrate your credentials.
Anyway, you don't have to use it if you don't want to. Apple just makes it so that you have the _option_ to. But you should at least recognize that it's the only given option that allows people to use the service without giving away their email address to random app developers. That's a huge privacy win for users.
As a developer? Oh yes I do! That's exactly what we're talking about.
And it's not going to fly for very long because Apple has over half of the smart phone users in the United States. This is the reason we have anti-trust laws. They're going to be knocked down a few notches soon in my opinion.
That I can't build an app business in the United States without going through Apple is a problem.
They speculate about why Apple are so keen on people to adopt Apple ID - not say they actually want to do those things. I think they're probably correct about why Apple wants more control by sucking tech into it's ecosystem.
The problem wasn't that the author couldn't access your precious email. The problem was that Apple used their power to force their auth solution onto the author, which means Apple has no incentive to make their solution good. It caused this developer enough grief that they intentionally removed support for Apple ID on other platforms as a small protest.
Please do not accuse people of malicious intent without evidence. You can discuss the merits of Apple ID without being a jerk.