Save My House From Apple | Hacker News Reader

Save My House From Apple

savemyhousefromapple.com

270 pointsmadmaze111 comments

I sympathise with the developers plight and this is a reason why I haven't wanted to get into App development. If your not battling people cloning your games, you have a constant axe swinging above your head that the app store may find fault with your App and remove it. You then have changing rules and requirements in the App Store..

The thing that bugs me a bit though is how the developer is asking for money. "Save my house." Its been 14 days since this revenue stream was compromised and the guy is apparently in financial trouble. This doesn't sound like Apples fault. This is a lack of financial planning.

I am by no means well off. I get by. My partner, my child and I were struck down by a bad virus last month. For 3 weeks I couldn't work, I could just about roll out of bed to get to the loo. I am a freelancer, I have no sick pay, no payment protection etc. For 3 weeks I earned nothing. My family is on a budget for the next month but we are fine. We have savings to get us through 3 months of joblessness.

If 14 days of near zero income pushes you over the edge and risks you loosing your house then you probably need a career change. That or its time to spend less and save more. For many profession's this isn't possible. Some people need several jobs to make ends meet. However, for a I expect fairly talented developer there are plenty of jobs and opportunites to get you on the right track.

As someone making a living from an App Store (though not Apples one), 14 days are enough to turn your emergency alarms. You need to know that

1- You get paid a month later. (and apparently, he is not going to for January) 2- If that's your dependable income, you'll need 3-4 months until you find a job or figure out a different revenue stream.

So if he is not getting paid for January, that's already 2 months of non-pay. But I agree on the lack of financial planning. Before jumping (and dropping from college) into this market (small products + freelancing), I saved 1 full year of expenses. Yes, you read it right, 1 full year.

My first aim is to guarantee the next year spendings. It's 70% done now (my year began on September, though). After that, I can spend/invest/save or whatever.

This site is good because it pokes Apple into action. However this seems like a temporary problem. It was pulled because of a problem on Apples end. There are a lot of companies who want an app in the app store or help with something. Its not difficult to find a temp job for a couple of weeks to tide you over.

Obviously it isn't ideal but you do what you have to do to keep going. If your revenue stream dries up you contact Apple to try to reestablish it. How long does that take? Maybe 1 email and 2 phone calls a day. Lets be generous and say this takes an hour each day. That then leaves 7 hours of thumb twiddling.

I have been in similar situations and have just nabbed a job on Guru. Its horrible BUT it brings in that little bit of money to keep the lights on until more work comes in.

Its horrible BUT it brings in that little bit of money to keep the lights on until more work comes in.

I agree on it's horrible, but I don't agree that it brings money. You are very likely to land a $500 job that takes over 80 or 100 hours of work, and the buyer may end up rating you badly or not paying you.

Hi Von, you are right abuout financial planning. Sadly, many live day to day or month to month. This is sometimes true of startups trying so hard to build a business from scratch. I feel for Bryan in the article. He took time to build something and allowed Apple to share in the revenue and used their forum to sell it to the public. Sadly, there are so many horror stories when a big entity is controlling markets. I know of many stories where Google sandboxes websites and they are no longer able to be in the natural search results. I also know personally of Google choosing not to allow ads. In one instance the ads were going to compete against AT&T who is one of their largest ad spenders. Is it a shock Google did not "allow" the smaller and less funded company? Ebay also knocks down and kicks out many smaller sellers. I know these large companies don't always mean hard but they many times hurt the little guy. How about in China where a site can be shut down for no reason except the government chooses they don't like it. If you are a creator you need numerous income streams and cannot rely on one company be it Google, Ebay, Microsoft's Bing, Apple or anything else. Always be on your toes and never take things for granted! This is a huge business lesson learned in the hard knocks of real business.

further, if Apple has an issue, why does begging for donations become his first option? If he's a freelancer, can't he get a short term gig? Or a short term job? Seems a bit weak...

Can he not setup a another developer account, and submit the app again?

That would most likely be a violation of their ToS and would give Apple a real reason to ban him.

This is the same Apple that plans for GateKeeper to check a certificate server for blacklisted apps and developers in OS X 10.8.

Imagine not even being in the App Store and your app's mainstream customers with default settings seeing a scary warning message because your certificate was accidentally blacklisted. Coming to the HN front page later this year..? :-)

Orienting your business around the ecosystem of a corporation with an itchy trigger finger is a tricky game of dice.

This isn't just an Apple problem. There's a disturbing trend here. All of the dominant internet companies exhibit this kind of nonsensical "evil" behavior: Google, eBay, Apple and Paypal, to name the most salient examples.

Way back when, Microsoft was openly painted by Apple (and the Apple cult followers) as being evil. Interestingly enough, Microsoft never sought to have this kind of a death grip on its users, at least not by force. And, I've never heard of MS killing-off someone's revenue stream like that. You buy their tools and develop for the platform. They don't have a say at all. That's the way it should be.

Somehow a united front needs to be organized and presented to these companies in order for them to understand that they are causing serious damage.

To say that, as entrepreneurs, businessmen and developers we don't want to see the tech landscape develop and evolve in this manner is probably an understatement.

I wonder if CNBC might be interested in doing a documentary on the damage to small businesses and entrepreneurs done by the likes of Google, Apple, eBay and Paypal? That could be an interesting angle.

The repeated comparison with Microsoft's "former" evil lacks perspective. Microsoft aimed higher and sought to pretty much own the entire ecosystem and everything in it. You don't need to kill of someone's revenue stream if you've taken said someone out of the equation entirely.

The painful difference is, where Microsoft actively aimed for the big game, leaving most smaller businesses to do as they please as long as they stayed small, the automated systems build to control rather than own the ecosystem (i.e. app stores) hurt everyone equally.

This leads to painful stories about big evil Apple/Google/eBay hurting the little guy. It sucks, it's a very worrying trend and I agree we should be pushing back.

But it's still nowhere near as "evil" as MS former dominance, when the options were a) build for Windows and get killed by MS if you become to big, or b)... Oh wait, there was no other option.

     But it's still nowhere near as "evil" as
     MS former dominance

This argument comes up a lot but I just don't see it.

In regards to the death of such companies like Netscape or Borland, you cannot put the blame on Microsoft's evilness. Sorry but you cannot. These companies completely fucked up their products. If they kept working and improving instead of fucking up their products, Borland would still sell developer tools and Netscape would still make serious money with their browser.

Also, take a look at Adobe. This company is not only big and old, but it thrived in a Microsoft-dominated world with products that directly competed with Microsoft's own products.

Now do a small exercise, take the effects of present-day Apple and scale that to a 90% market-share.

Yes, there seems to be some disconnect between Microsft killing off competition and said competition simply being worse. Not to say that there weren't smaller companies with good products that were pushed out by some intentional decisions on Microsoft's part, but the headline examples always rung a bit hollow for me.

IE > Netscape

Visual Studio > anything by Borland

Excel > Lotus

Word > Wordperfect

People forget, because it's seen as "hip" to hate on it now, but when IE6 was released, it really was a better browser than the competition.

What killed Netscape was that version 3.0 of their server products were terrible. At the time I was working for a company that had spent millions on version 2. It was easier to jump platforms than to try to get 3 stable for us...

Dude, people don't hate IE6 because it's hip, we hate it because it has wasted hours and hours and hours of time for each and every one of us who design for the web, and the websites you use are worse as a result.

Maybe IE6 was better than the competition in 2001, but it was also terribly buggy and non-standards-compliant, encouraged developers to include Windows-only components that made it impossible for users to change browsers or even upgrade, and then wasn't upgraded for 5 years. Five years. And they did it that way not by accident or incompetence, but because they knew before anyone else that the web was a competitor, and they wanted to screw it up as much as possible.

Hate hate hate IE6 and be proud of it. Microsoft has a lot of karma to make up.

Yes, but from when IE4 came out (1997) until late 2004 when Firefox came out, IE was the undisputed best browser (yes I'm ignoring Opera as we always have). That was 7 very long years of getting people to upgrade to IE from NN4.

What? No. Borland was vastly superior to Visual Studio. Today Visual Studio is the best IDE in existence, but in the Borland days creating a GUI was much, much easier in Borland.

Half of the reason Netscape and Borland died was because of their own mistakes. The other half was that Microsoft had competing products and proceeded to crush them. If Microsoft had taken graphics editing more seriously by creating a Photoshop competitor bundled with Office or built Silverlight 5 years earlier than they did instead of bundling Flash into Windows, Adobe's story would have been very different.

On how many products can a single company work on? If Microsoft focused on a Photoshop clone, that focus would have been lost from somewhere else, just how they moved the engineers that worked on IExplorer to Silverlight. It's as simple as that.

Even if a company is one of the biggest and wealthiest in the world, development still takes time and resources. Which is why hypothetical questions like what would have happened if Microsoft built Silverlight earlier DO NOT make sense, simply because they didn't build Silverlight earlier and that's that.

Disregarding the fact that Microsoft already had a Flash competitor (ActiveX), Silverlight's technical advantages comes from the underlying platform, which is .NET and no matter how you look at it, if you're talking about current-day Silverlight, then you must include .NET into that equation.

On building Silverlight 5 years earlier, that would have been impossible, considering you're talking about year 2003, with .NET being initially released in 2002. So to make that decision 5 years earlier, then you have to shift the evolution of everything that led to it 5 years earlier. That means the release of .NET should have been in 1997, so development on it should have started somewhere in 1994, before the release of Windows 95.

You could then say that if only Microsoft invested more resources into .NET and Silverlight, then these projects would have been released faster. But by all indications Microsoft made .NET and the Avalon-related technologies (like WPF and Silverlight) their top priority, so they simply couldn't work faster.

"If Microsoft focused on a Photoshop clone, that focus would have been lost from somewhere else"

huh?

So all that time they were working on silverlight, there was no one working on xbox. or office. or ie. or windows vista/7/xp-patches. or sharepoint. or asp.net. or sql server. or iis. or c#. or linq. or ford sync tech. or metro. or windows phone 7.

Please...

had they wanted to get in to the photoshop realm, they would have.

Adobe's big cash cow is Photoshop. Photoshop users are traditionally Mac loyalists, I doubt many of them would have given any MS offering the time of day.

Photoshop users use Mac because it works the best for what they're doing. If they could have had the same solution vastly cheaper and 80-90% as good you think they'd have been willing to pay thousands more for that 10-20%?

I think they already do that, don't see many professional graphics people using GIMP and others.

Photoshop gives you much more than 20% over GIMP. Photoshop is light years ahead of anything else out there and only getting more so (see latest sneak of deblurring photos).

dr dos

screen savers

disk compressors

> Microsoft aimed higher and sought to pretty much own the entire ecosystem and everything in it.

They've wanted to own the ecosystem but not everything in it. In fact, there was a significant strategic tension between wanting to control the tools developers use to build apps and wanting to leave the app development space as open and accessible as possible.

You don't need a developer licence to write an app to run on Windows. Likewise, you don't need permission from Microsoft to sell that app to Windows users. You don't even need to be running Windows on your development machine. Those are three significant, meaningful ways that Microsoft's approach, even at its most hegemonic, has always been more open, accessible and inclusive than Apple's.

You do not need anything from Apple to write or sell apps for the Mac, either, and I do not think you ever needed that (early Macintosh, say before the phonebook edition of Inside Macintosh, may have been an exception, as the information you needed simply was not out there. You also would have needed a Mac to write the floppy disks that most software got distributed on (there was some distribution over the Internet using Kermit))

It is true that it is way easier to write programs using Apple's (free, at the moment) tools, and it sure helps to have access to a Mac, if alone for testing, but you do not _need_ either. In that, it is not that much different from Windows. You can write Windows (Win32 or .NET) tools on Unix, but I would not advise going that way.

> You do not need anything from Apple to write or sell apps for the Mac,

For now that remains true on OSX, but it's not true for iOS, which is what TFA is about, and as OSX imports more ideas from iOS I'm not entirely comfortable it will remain true.

Sorry, lost track of that in this branch.

However, and probably due to Apple, the new Windows 8 tablets (and the Metro UI for all forms of Windows 8) will only run applications from their new Windows Store.

So while they may not have before, Microsoft is certainly not immune from this trend.

Of course there is Windows desktop that does not have such limitations and a much broader distribution that any other platform.

broader distribution than any other platform, except the web.

Sure. That's another way to release the software if it works for you. The article talked about a software released via mac appstore. So obviously web was not an option for him for some reason.

Somehow a united front needs to be organized and presented to these companies in order for them to understand that they are causing serious damage.

The Free Software/Open Source community has been talking about this for years.

We'll still here. We have open source licences that you can use to prevent people doing certain things.

I can imagine a situation where a 20 dev shop gets closed because of something like this and they can't make payroll. There are lot of people here basing their company on an App in the app store. I'd be terrified.

Diversification really helps. Basing something on a single platform, particularly one that is so tighly controlled is suicidal.

Great in theory, but there really isn't a good way to diversify if you're making apps. Yes there's Android, and some apps can make as much or more money on Android, but even if the app is making the same amount on both platforms, iOS kicking you out for no good reason could cut your income in half, which can put a company out of business almost as quickly as cutting off all of their money, if they've grown it based on what they believe to be a steady income stream.

Given the kind of draconian control apple has on its store, there is always a risk if you are part of the ecosystem. But earning half income is still better than none right? Besides now windows has app store too and a much bigger distribution. If you don't like Apple's terms and your other platforms are making enough money you always have an option of kissing goodbye to apple. My point is that diversification gives you options.

Both androind and Windows provide guidelines to port over your applications over. So I don't think this option exists only in practice.

Use the open web. Ignore app stores. Yes, you might have to change how you make money. But better than a faustian deal

"Coming to the HN front page later this year..?"

I assume this may be a theme in the making.. I wonder if App Store like ecosystems have similar issues. I havnt heared of any in the android market, but im sure similar cases can be found.

Still, with android market, once your app has a reputation, you have a fair chance to distribute by yourself, as few devices lock down the side-loading capability.

Except on AT&T.

That hasn't been the case for months, AT&T has been allowing sideloading for a while now.

That's just one carrier in the US.

android market may be a little freer but I wouldn't personally put all my eggs in that basket either.

People are a little wary of downloading from android store because of the scaremongering over viruses etc.

Also there are many people who seem to give bad reviews on android store with little justification.

Apple did this to me too, without explanation. They've owed me $13,860 for over a year now.

You're 100% at their mercy.

We should start a poll to see how common this is

I'd like to hear more details before a poll would be meaningful. With that kind of money owing, wouldn't legal action be a reasonable option by now?

Legal action from an independent dev against Apple is like challenging an aircraft carrier with a golf club.

Not so if they owe him "$13,860".

Having a lot of money and a big legal department doesn't automatically make it easy to get out of unpaid debts. Courts take these things very seriously.

If there's a contractual get-out clause that allows Apple to avoid payment, or if there's something in the developers actions that has created ambiguity, then it would be good for all of us to understand the details.

A poll that basically says "hands up if you think Apple owes you money" is not informative.

See the recent case of the woman who won against Honda in small claims court for advertising inaccurate mileage: http://www.thedetroitbureau.com/2012/02/woman-wins-honda-hyb...

Of course, Honda plans to appeal, so...

though after looking im not sure how to do so

I believe you can use http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

You need a certain amount of karma to make polls. Not sure how much - but it's more than 465, which is what I have.

You only need 20 karma to make polls.

Please elaborate on the details. This is something that should be brought to light.

--initial comment, Hello, Hacker news!

Apple software distribution system is a feudal system where, unfortunately, programmer is a peasant.

Being employed by any normal company makes you 100% dependent on a single entitity. In contrast, being independent allows you to put your eggs into different bags. The App Stores are a part of it by providing international payment. What would you suggest instead?

I don't mean that, this kind of work is bad I mean the apple attitude to developers is bad. I haven't thought it through anyway, sorry.

Sounds like really poor personal finances. An individual should have at least 6 months to a year of savings so a 2-4 week outage is really no dent at all to your well being.

I run my own company, and I often go into the red for months at a time. I agree, you need to account for worst case scenarios.

Ah, so I'm guessing you understand this guy's situation entirely, allowing you to comment on his personal finances without sounding like a jackass. Otherwise, you wouldn't have posted, right?

"Apple removed my software (how I pay the bills) from the Mac App Store"

"We've lost nearly half a month of income (so far) due to this and there is also some question as to when we might hope to see payment from Apple for the previous month's (January) software sales. It looks like that may not happen any time soon. (This isn't the only case where Apple has hurt people who do things right lately.)"

So the individual hasn't seen a check for 2 months. We are a nation that loves to buy more than we can afford. Why should I feel sorry and bail someone out for making poor choices prior to this two month period of suckiness handed down by Apple?

I am taking it as an opportunity to remind people. That rainy days happen. And it's best if you plan in advance. However, we as a society would rather buy a brand new iPad 3 instead of put money in the bank.

In my opinion it's even more irresponsible to not have such savings when you're raising a family. Maybe they had some big medical expenses but to be in such dire straits after 2 months is indicative of some poor planning either way.

Yes, you're entirely correct. There are countless situations that people might find themselves short of money and an event like this ruins their finances.

For the grandparent, consider my scenario. My wife lost her job a few years ago and was unable to find a new one since then (apart from some low-paying unstable jobs now and then). During the course of these few years our savings were eaten bit by bit and we're now reduced to a situation where we live literally from month to month. We've reduced the expenses as much as we could (for example, no winter vacation this year or no eating out), but still my paycheck can barely cover monthly expenses. No savings left for rainy days. And I fear that an exceptional event might be ruinous for our finances. My two kids are too small to be aware of this, but it still pains me.

It seems like a jerky thing to say. However, by the looks of things, OP had a couple of years to save up for a rainy day.

I'm willing to grant that apple is horrible, evil, son of the devil, voted for Palin, whatever. but really, is this any worse than a car accident or a heart attack?

"is this any worse than a car accident or a heart attack?"

In some ways yes. We generally have car and medical insurance to help with the financial side of catastrophic events. There is no 'software dev' insurance to help mitigate things if someone doesn't pay you or reneges on their contract. You have to bear all the costs of legal and administrative costs in chasing down the other party.

Perhaps some dev insurance program would be able to bear up to $x legal cost in exchange for y% of your burden.

Why isn't there a Developer Relations department at Apple to handle problems like this? Apple has made billions upon billions of dollars because developers have decided it was the best environment to make money and they put their weight behind iOS/Apple, yet somehow stuff like this drops through the cracks.

I mean am I really going to feel safe quitting my job to make iOS/Mac apps if Apple can just cut off my revenue stream without recourse? This is an easy problem for Apple to fix and it'll cost them somewhere down the line where someone with the next big app decides not to chance it because he's heard that Apple may just dump you and not give any reasons why.

Because they don't have to. Because they can screw you as much as they like, and you will still be developing for their platform, buying their hardware, paying for their developer program, etc. Because you have no choice - they are a monopoly in mobile space, and you can't just ignore them (while they can ignore you). Because by not being their customer you're hurting yourself more then them.

Basically, because they can.

Except that they do.

Why isn't there a Developer Relations department at Apple to handle problems like this?

Actually, although lots of people seem to think Apple doesn't offer contact by phone, it does:

https://developer.apple.com/contact/phone.php

Having said that, presumably these were the very people not assisting the OP. I've never called them about an App Store issue, only about account issues (problems with bank details, changing from personal to company account etc.)

Somewhat tangental, but this is the second post I've seen here recently that plays up the ".. and this happened on my birthday!" angle ( this being the first: http://lunduke.com/?p=2206 ).

I'm extremely sympathetic to anyone who's struggling, but seriously, why should a birthday matter in this context? You can debate Apple's app store policy, but should they be expected to factor in stuff like birthdays when they enforce it? It just seems like a cheap pity play that, for me at least, undermines whatever point is being made.

That looks like the same guy?

This seems shady to me.

I have apps on the iOS store as well (just like many of you) so I am aware of the emails you get from Apple telling you that your Apple developer account is going to expire. I have never heard of another developer having a problem with renewing their credentials. If there was an actual bug, I don't doubt more developers would be affected.

Honestly, I bet he forgot to renew, his apps got pulled, and now he's scrambling to cover his losses.

He renewed in time, it was Apple that made the mistake.

"Three days later I was able to get a response from Apple that verified this was, indeed, a problem with their internal software and that there was nothing I could do about it." Quoth the article.

Maybe not.

http://lunduke.com/?p=2206

In the comments someone mentions a similar situation that resolved when his original account expired.

Oh, yeah, so it is. I didn't notice initially. Probably explains why I was so reminded.

Again though.. I hate to see devs getting screwed over in any context, and I wish Bryan the best, but personally I think he's making his point poorly. Apple is not trying to take his house, and his birthday is irrelevant to their actions.

AppStore is not the only way to sell the software. And I don't get why instead of asking for donation he didn't put a "buy button" right there, on the story page?

I'd rather buy his stuff than simply donate him money. This way it would be better for both of us.

Instead he asks for money "for free" and does not provide a direct link to buy his app. This looks really strange.

"Everyone who donates will receive a free copy of my video game (2299 : THE GAME) and my visual app development tool (Illumination Software Creator). Both run on Linux, Windows and Mac. I'll also throw in the first two issues of my comic book (Road-Sign Hank)."

I donated some cash because I feel bad, but I hope you've learnt your lesson: Do not base your entire livelyhood at the mercy of anybody but yourself, and especially not a huge corporation.

This also goes for anybody who takes out a mortgage they can't afford. Don't ever get any debt or create any expenses you will no longer be able to pay if you got fired tomorrow.

Let's be honest here: is not a startup based upon putting your entire livelihood at the mercy of a few small actors? That first customer, that first investor, that first employee, that first acquisition offer? Of course, we take measures to try to minimize the impact any one party, deal, or decision has on our overall success, but the fact is that there are often choke points in building a business or company where you do have to put all your eggs in one or two baskets. Not sure if that's the case here, but it's certainly not a hard and fast rule that you always have to avoid taking "all-in" risks. (Though maybe that's more the case if you have a family to feed and insufficient savings to avoid the fall...)

Starting a startup is like going to Vegas: you absolutely need to give yourself a limit before hand of how much you're willing to lose, stick to it, and go in expecting to lose it.

If you have a family to feed and a mortgage to pay, you should not work at a startup.

One of the reasons why we've had this latest recessions is because consumers have been financially irresponsable, taking out mortgages they can't afford, relying 100% on their salary for income and having no backup plan.

If I were to lose my job tomorrow, I would be fine for the most part. I'd probably have to move out and get a cheaper apartment, but I'd be fine. I'm not shackled to a mortgage and have no debt of any kind. I'm working towards success, but I'm ready for whatever life decides to throw my way.

"Do not base your entire livelyhood at the mercy of anybody but yourself, and especially not a huge corporation."

This seems to apply to a vast, vast majority of the population... In our little tech/entrepreneur bubble, we're the exception, not the rule, in that we can generate income largely by ourselves.

Exactly. Anyone who works for the an is basing their livelihood on that one huge corporation.

I know the job market sucks but I've been to many countries and if there's one industry with tons of demand and limited supply; it's software development.

it's hard for me to accept that an iPhone developer is down to live on donations in the current job climate.

Apple provides a free storefront for Mac apps. It is by no means the only way to purchase Mac apps. A glitch occurs that removes a piece of software from the free Apple-provided storefront.

...

I'm having a really hard time figuring out the part here where Apple is some evil entity depriving a developer of their livelihood. Sure, this sucks, but it's not like nobody can buy your software. There's plenty of Mac software out there that isn't even on the Mac app store to begin with, so I'm having a hard time figuring out why this developer is having such a huge problem that he needs to resort to begging for donations.

That sucks, and I hope you get things sorted out. My apps are just for extra cash, but I'd still be pretty upset if I were in your situation.

Unfortunately, this highlights the drawbacks of relying on a third-party for all of your income, especially when the relationship is one-sided. Apple's App Store is an incredible opportunity for a lot of developers, but for the vast majority, Apple has very little accountability to you.

This is no different than the people who build a business around AdSense, only to be terminated and receive the silent treatment at some point - which itself is nothing new, as this has been going on with affiliate programs since I got involved with them in the mid-90's. If I've learned one thing, it's this: Don't ever build your company around another company unless you have a really good personal relationship with them or a strong, fair contract.

They've screwed you again: your donation slider doesn't work on the iPhone. Best of luck to you.

Just FYI, iOS happily supports <input type=range>.

What bothers me is the apparent lack of accountability. Apple pulls an app off the app store any time under rules so complicated and vague this power becomes completely discretionary. Or does it by mistake. I'd like to see the process Apple uses to ensure a rogue censor will not remove an app from the store because they don't like it, its publisher or got paid by a competitor.

The worst part is that Apple isn't even the worst offender around.

I'm amazed anyone decides to develop for the Apple app stores. This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened, by a long shot. Due diligence means not putting all your eggs in the Apple basket.

You are using Paypal for donations. There have been many horror stories on HN about people doing a donation drive and getting accounts closed by Paypal citing ToS.

It's definitely a risk. You can actually ask PayPal proactively to review your site to see whether your use of the word 'Donate' is acceptable for them. I did for one of my sites and they were very quick to respond. This still gives you no guarantees that they won't change their minds later, but it does at least give some reassurance about their current thinking.

But isn't he 'selling' something (software) in return for those 'donations'?

From what happened to a game developer in the past (can't remember the name, it was some isometric zombie game), even though the dev was "selling" the game, the button said "donate" and he wasn't a non-profit, so all the money got frozen.

Actually thinking about it, that may have been Google Checkout, but the point still remains.

I think stuff like this is one of the reasons that there aren't many serious big ticket apps on the store (at ones that aren't also available elsewhere).

If I were to develop for iPhone there is no way I would invest serious R&D time and money into something with the risk that this could happen. More likely I'd just build a bunch of $1-5 apps and have them suddenly flatlining either because of this or user apathy factored into my plans.

I wouldn't trust the arbitrary mercies of any large corporation to put food on my (hypothetical) kid's table.

I wonder if he's planning on figuring out how to make money from software sales in a way that doesn't involve Apple. They're total asshats when it comes to things like this.

Note that if you donate money to this guy, you're indirectly encouraging apple's behaviour.

The writing is on the wall. The smart way to make money in the app stores is consulting for somebody else.

And this is why app-stores with single-sided and super-rigid rules are a BAD thing. They operate as a black box, with you having NO way of knowing why, how, if, when or what is going to happen. This is why Chrome store, Windows Store and the App store and all the others are just bad for business (in general). If they decide they don't like it, then you're fucked!

You just DON'T trust a single entity to handle all your sales and finances while they have ABSOLUTE power to terminate their service any time they want. Have a backup, sell it on your own web site.. oh no you can't because this is Apple...

I have two Macs, two iPhones, an iPad and some Apple Software and I enjoyed them. Also I told my Father to buy Apple products (since I'm the one who tells him how his computer works). I saw Apple getting more and more ridiculous over the last few years (there are hundreds of stories), so here is my conclusion:

Getting more money makes them more evil. That's it for me. I'm not going to buy any Apple products again. I was using a lot of OSS tools, so switching to Linux should be easy.

My Advice to software developers is:

Try to make cross-platform software. You are giving such companies much less power this way.

A typical example of putting all your eggs in the same basket. When you are an app developper, distributing your software in different platforms/means would probably reduce the risk of that happening.

I wish I could blame my own impoverishment (and consequently my family's) on anything other than my own foolishness but I can't, so I donated. The money's probably safer with him anyway.

I feel sorry for his family, but rely exclusively in apple store, or whatever store, is insane. Actually, the all idea of stores is, IMHO, a bad idea, because who control the app's relevance is not the user, and this is very wrong in a market. My 2 cents.

Obligatory: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...

Done mate!! I do agree with the pains one has to undergo developing for the itunes store and more so when the glitch on their part directly affects you.

Oh wow! This is Bryan from the Linux Action show.

Best of luck

That's the thing I don't understand. Why some developers are so prone to the naive following the latest fashion... I mean really.

Look, why to spend any time writing software that might be just killed overnight by a big faceless corporation? The same Apple Fan Boys who hate Adobe Flash because it is "closed" and not html5 "standard" as were told by their guru are at the very same time so heavily invested in Apple Corp closed eco-system that is just so much worse than anything that Adobe does.

I just don't get it.

> I just don't get it.

I've read that, in order to get the #1 slot in "top grossing" for iOS apps, you need to be earning between $40k-$100k per day.

The publisher I'm working with has been sitting on an app that's been in the top 5 grossing for 5-6 months.

Follow the money...

sure, then write Flash people make $$$ on Flash too.

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