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Comment by flutas | Hacker News Reader

Uber was famously caught trying to circumvent reviewers to hide their device fingerprinting and the result was a phone call from Tim Cook threatening them, but not outright removal. At the time I'm not sure if any profit from Uber actually flowed to Apple either.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/23/15399438/apple-uber-app-s...

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Even a threatening phone call is at least Apple treating an app developer with enough regard to actually include human interaction in the process (from the CEO, no less), as opposed to a boilerplate two sentence non-explanation for rejection. That only applies to the makers of apps with enough users to warrant a personal touch.

I doubt any company who abused data tracking on App Store would be surprised by a rejection email. The only question they will have is "what exact part of our tracking they noticed?"

I do think these ubiquitous "mega-apps" (whatever the word is) hold leverage on Apple as well. Telling their billion users they can't access an app like Uber because they broke some privacy rule or stood their ground on the Apple tax could be a hard sell. Although obviously not impossible like we've seen with Fortnite (not that I'd rank it alongside the Uber/Netflix/Spotify/YouTube and co of this world).

So, FWIW what Uber was doing was flagging if banned iPhones had been wiped and reset. Apple actually gave Uber specific APIs to persistently flag iPhones as banned (as part of DeviceCheck).

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