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Comment by veeti | Hacker News Reader

They are opaquely rejecting apps for just literally containing the string "itms-services" in the binary and you still give them credit for a more sophisticated analysis? Lol.

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You’re assuming that’s all they are doing, and that it’s all they will ever do, but neither assumption is supported by any evidence.

Apple is saying what test broke, not that other tests aren’t running.

No. See the above article for more information, specifically the discussion linked [1].

> Some light obfuscation of the magic string appears to avoid the issue.

It is a simple string match causing the failure.

[1] https://discuss.python.org/t/handling-incompatibilities-with...

Fair enough, though I was really just saying that simply because they are doing something simple doesn't mean that don't (or, more importantly, won't) do something complex. In the LWN article discussion it's mentioned that Apple doesn't like obfuscation, presumably this means they can detect some forms of it.

Put another way: if it was my app, and this string wasn't important to me, I wouldn't want it obfuscated, I'd want it removed.

If they did are doing more, why are the apps getting rejected?

We can assume that a simple string search is one of the basic checks they do before moving onto more advanced checks.

Every story I've seen over the years about MAS/iOS AS rejections point to their checks not being advanced at all.

Why can we assume that?

Because it’s less effort to implement?

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