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Comment by DerJacques | Hacker News Reader

Looks super clean! Great work. The idea of always having the Chat GPT a shortcut away is very neat.

I have a similar toy-app called Chitty (https://chitty-app.com), and recently decided to pull it from the App Store and offer direct downloads instead, because Apple kept throwing wrenches my way. Most notably, in a random app update review I was told that I could no longer reference ChatGPT or OpenAI, and I was not allowed users to "unlock" functionality by letting them provide their OpenAI API key. Note that I don't monitize the app in any way, so asking people to enter their OpenAI key is the only way to make the app work without causing a major bill for me.

It seems like your app get's around the API key issue by offering in-app purchases, which is good! I would recommend also making sure not to reference ChatGPT and OpenAI too much in the app or the App Store page, though the details may depend on the specific app reviewer you're assigned :)

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Also, thanks! Very nice to hear that someone appreciates my work, means a lot! Sad to hear Apple didn't allow you to offer the "bring your own keys" model. I was considering that it would be an attractive option for more tech-savvy users to avoid the apple tax. As app developers, we could still charge for the app, but not for usage. For more professional applications like coding with GPT-4 that would make a noticeable difference for end users spending.

It seems really like this Mac App Store is doing nobody good, neither users nor app creators. Everytime some new app points me to the store I get annoyed. It frequently hangs and just is glitchy in gerenal. Just give me the damn DMG and let me go on my way…

My offline LLM app (which does not use ChatGPT or any OpenAI APIs) was rejected 3 times in review, also during a random app update. With every rejection, they'd ask me to rename the app. Ultimately, I appealed and they relented.

That sounds like a bad time! Glad you were able to resolve it at the end.

I do feel that being in the App Store can give a lot of value (and downloads), but it definitely comes at a cost (mainly uncertainty).

I was also rejected for the app description, however I decided to argue against their ruling. I changed the description slightly, however when submitting a new build I pointed out that all my materials are written in accordance with OpenAI brand guidelines, and the app successfully passed the review.

Downloaded Chitty, entered API key, clicked "Alan Turing", crash. Do you want me to send the crash report somewhere?

Oh no, sorry to hear that. If you could send it to manuel<at>manuelt.de, that would be lovely! Thanks.

Alright, sent! I haven't had a problem since relaunching it after the crash. It's nice and snappy! As a convenience feature, I'm missing syntax highlighting for code snippets. But maybe that is what makes the other apps so slow? :)

And as far as features go, I don't see a way to set the temperature.

Awesome! Thanks a lot for the feedback. Syntax highlighting sounds like a great idea, and I wouldn’t expect it to be a big performance hit.

Exposing more API options (such as temperature) is definitely on the list! I just added custom function support (running small JS scripts, Wolfram Alpha and Shell commands), and more options is next!

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