App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
> It has no tarot function, no horoscopes, and nothing that I, or anyone else I’ve asked, would associate with astrology.
I have dealt with the Byzantine App Store bureaucracy before. What you do here, is you submit a new version, pretty much identical to the previous one, with the comment “tarot function removed”.
If you can't state the truth, then don't answer.
App stores should not exist in a world where only two phone operating systems exist. All apps MUST be installable via web.
Come on, EU. Help us out here. Free us from distribution tyranny. Do it before Google morphs into the same hell beast.
Soon you won't be able to read unapproved, unattested bytes. It's coming. We need as many freedoms as we can get.
Apple can be a great company without the app store monopoly. So can Google.
I've been curious about the north korean mobile OS...
Since real people review apps, Apple should charge per app / version submission.
None of what you say can explain that Apple reviewers falsely accuse an app of being astrology when absolutely nothing proves it and double down when shown they are wrong. Again, absolutely nothing there could be explained by an "exponential number of submissions" nor solved by charging developers (even more than they already do!).
Stop defending the indefensible.
Poor Apple needs to ask for even more money to do their job?
Sure seems like they could find some other way.
Or they could let developers upload apps to another app store. Apple isn't reviewing them out of charity, they're doing it to enforce a monopoly where they get a 30% cut of every developer's income.
Apple does not audit source code, they do very simple behavioral analysis. And, evidently, even get that wrong, this post serving as an example.
No can do, EU is busy mandating only Google/Apple devices for national digital ID.
> Soon you won't be able to read unapproved, unattested bytes. It's coming.
happy EU noises
"I do not see the conflict between the view that the App Store review system is failing and the view that it's not the government's business to intervene. Allowing failing systems to fail is how market forces work." https://mastodon.social/@gruber/117055639204173161
The App Store doesn't compete on its own merits because Apple actively prevents competition from letting it decide what the better system is.
If there are two producers each with ~50% market share, it's not profitable for one of them to improve their product such that they capture an additional 5% of the market but reduces the profit margin of their product by 10%. If there are 50 producers each with ~2% market share, one of them would happily capture 5% of the market (more than doubling the size of their business!) by sacrificing 10% of their profit margin.
In the Google-Apple duopoly it's much more profitable to engage in tacit collusion than it is to defect.
Necessity really is the mother of invention, and the more we need something new, the sooner someone will invent it. But it will look no more like an iPhone than the iPhone looked like a PC.
2004 11%
2005 17%
2006 37%
2007 42%
2008 27%
2009 15%
2010 7%
2011 3%
I actually suspected as much and left "competing smartphones" somewhat vague.
> When Windows seemed entrenched forever
It's still entrenched! Microsoft got a slap on the wrist by the government right before September 11, and antitrust enforcement has been on a holiday ever since.
> the platforms that eventually surpassed weren’t the competing desktop OSes (Mac and Linux)
In terms of revenue, desktop computers were surpassed by smartphones, but they were not replaced by smartphones. I don't consider them to be directly competing products, and most of us who can afford it own both. A smartphone fits in your pocket, whereas a keyboard and pointing device and large screen will never fit in your pocket.
The modern smartphone became popular and dislodged the previous status quo because they were genuinely new form factors and interfaces. They didn't just steal the market away from Blackberry and Windows Phone, they invented a new one and starved out the previous.
And if a new platform were to arrive, they're so broad that it's entirely possible they wouldn't even compete on the App Store. When companies squeeze out and screw over others, and the market isn't able to signal that its not good, it's time for regulators to step in.
Yes, free markets are good to a lot of things. No, they don't adjust for complex matters if consumers don't understand then. No, they don't work when monopolies are involved. No, the government setting some boundaries is not the same as socialism.
Example: company adds a cheap ingredient to food that makes it tastier. Studies show a high chance of cancer. This doesn't affect the company margins, so it keeps adding and selling. Consumers are unaware, they keep buying. A good willing competitor has a dillema: poison its customers or lose clients to competition. Guess who can help? The state: it can forbid that ingredient! Now this levels the field for all companies and customers are healthy.
Just jiggle the carousel a bit and it lets you proceed.
Read https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
You can still always get around them (at least my experience), but it just takes a lot of time
(b) Don’t submit apps that are indistinguishable from what's already widely available. Opportunistically creating variants of existing app categories or popular apps degrades App Store discovery, reduces overall app quality, and harms both users and developers. Certain kinds of apps, such as dating, flashlight, sound effects, wallpaper, simple timers, and fortune telling, are well established on the App Store and we will not accept new submissions unless they offer a meaningfully different or improved experience. We may remove these apps from the App Store going forward if they are not updated, improved, or do not attract customers. Other kinds of apps, such as drinking games, Kama Sutra, fart, and burp apps, are mediocre, low-quality, or low-effort and do not add value to the App Store. Repeated submissions of this kind may lead to removal from the Apple Developer Program.
I submitted a timer app this year and it got approved. It's literally just a slightly more feature-rich timer.
I made this as a "my first app" type of experience. Never at any point was the quality of my app questioned, and I'm the first person who will tell you that it's not very good.
They are probably making a killing on people who forgot about or can't figure out how to cancel the $4.99/week subscription on the top 20-30 of these apps.
All this while of course the one app you've been working on for a year will be held up with multiple rounds of rejections weeks apart. For all the good Cook has done in his 15 years at Apple, the App Store will be the one real stain on his legacy, and I hope Ternus is as acutely cognizant of that as the developer community is.
Well, and the Apple Car. And the Butterfly Keyboard and that horrible i9 16" MBP. Plus the Airpower, and the Vision Pro, and he cancelled the entire Mac Pro lineup too. Also the $1,000 VESA monitor mount and goofy desktop wheels, and we should probably also mention his meetings with Donald Trump and eventual White House dinner with Bin Salman. Tim also failed to legally deter NSO Group, held a grudge against Nvidia during a $4 trillion ARM/CUDA datacenter boom, greenlit Liquid Glass, proposed Client-Side Scanning and fought dirty against organic and reasonable EU regulations.
But besides that, yes, the pitiful state of the App Store will be remembered as his true strategic slip-up.
How is the Apple Car a stain on his legacy? They worked on something, and decided not to do it. Who cares? Apple’s management of the App Store has ruined mobile apps. Nobody gives a shit about the car.
They don't want 100 apps that do the exact same thing.
I read it as the "insane" part parent is pointing at.
It's nothing new, has been going on basically since the existence of the App store and Apple has explicitly built their whole business to put themselves as the arbiter of who gets to have their app on people's phones.
Still it's healthy that from times to time we stop and shout "that whole situation is insane" (short of finding a way to actually do something about it)
Which makes this a good time to remind everyone about the Keep Android Open movement:
> "Starting in 2027*, a silent update, nonconsensually pushed by Google, will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed over government ID."
Like maybe people are so much more willing to even look at your mobile app because they got it from one of those two opinionated companies.
Whatever friction that causes for app publishers, it seems to generally work for users.
I got rejected with a screenshot from an app that doesn’t have anything like the screenshot, it took me several rejections to realize someone reviewer watched some old YouTube video I submitted ages ago and didn’t like something that was fine before…. They have a login where they can see the first page , I gave it to them , but they chose to reject because of an old video.
I recently signed up for a personal dev account for the play store and I have to get 12 friends with android devices to “test” it before they’ll consider my app at all…
That is to say I have to go online and horse trade with 12 people (hell if I know who these people are or what their unapproved apps do…) and get them to test mine if I test theirs. That alone is suspicious kinda behavior but google all but requires it now.
Meanwhile on my work account I’m publishing just fine.
> There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.
The same is true for computers. Solutions that "allow competent individuals" to do something are also typically solutions scammers can convince Grandma to perform without understanding what they do.
(Case in point: I saw a fake captcha that told you to open Terminal and paste a command to "prove" you're human; https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/1rq4bh6/warning_suspic...)
Pro: I can use a convoluted process to install an astronomy app Apple didn't like.
Con: Billions of dollars of life savings siphoned off with devastating consequences.
I'm by no means a maximalist on either side of this, but technologists aren't the only ones who get a say here.
I agree with you on the risks of this sort of protection! But I understand what it’s like for non-technical folks in a technical society. Their needs do matter.
That the gatekeeper and government benefit from this arrangement is just a happy accident.
That’s the reality. As with most things in society, it’s left to people to negotiate the balance.
We don't have to make it trivially easy.
If you give a toddler a butcher's knife to play with and they get hurt, you'll likely get in trouble for child endangerment.
Using my car requires it be registered, pass my state's safety standards, and that I possess a valid license and follow a wide variety of rules.
Maybe a certain level of protection is, at times, acceptable?
Social engineering is the weakest link even if your grandma is doing all her banking on Windows XP.
No, not necessarily. Quite a few countries have restrictions on knives, including some parts of the US - a switchblade will get you in trouble in NYC.
> you can drive your own car
Only in approved ways!
Hell, you'll get in trouble if your gasoline is the wrong color.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_dye#Fuel_dye_in_North_Ame...
"Detection of red-dyed fuel in the fuel system of an on-road vehicle will incur substantial penalties."
> murderers will still murder and scammers will still scam
Do we not take steps to try and reduce murder?
You've missed my point even though it's right in front of you. You won't get in trouble for using your Apple device in non-approved ways because it doesn't let you. Would you ban cars for everyone because it's not safe for grandma to drive anymore? Probably not - so why lock down devices for everyone?
> Do we not take steps to try and reduce murder?
Not directly? Gun/knife control probably helps but people willing to risk the consequences of murder are not going to care about breaking more laws to get illegal weapons. Or just use a weapon that's easy to get.
The government won't let me use my car in non-approved ways. They will, in fact, stop me with guns at times.
I'm not even allowed to purchase some items, let alone use as I please. I'm allowed to buy (or sell) a https://www.fairphone.com/ style device! But no one really wants them.
Not relevant. Most people don't choose their phone/platform based on how much freedom it gives you. An iPhone is a very good phone overall but the restrictions are unfortunately bundled in.
You're obviously fine with it but it is only going to get worse in the future. The whole Android developer verification thing is a step in the same direction from Google's side. Eventually macOS will be locked down or even phased out - most young people just do everything on their phone now so why not? I don't want to accept that future so I'm not supporting platforms that restrict it.
Right but granny is not a child, she is kind of the opposite of a child.
You're essentially saying we should child proof the entire world, right. Appeal to the lowest common denominator and DO NOT offer back doors. But that's a plainly ridiculous notion and everyone knows it. This argument only works on smartphones right now because it's the status-quo. As soon as you extend it to literally any other domain, it immediately crumbles and falls between your fingers.
Yes, there IS a certain level of protection that is acceptable at all times. But that level is absolutely not "maximum protection, no other options sorry". Which is what Apple is trying to do. This really is "no sale of knives" type stuff. That sounds ridiculous, right? Because it is, and we let Apple get away with murder.
The failure modes are often quite similar - cognitive/motor issues and lack of experience with the tools offered.
> Appeal to the lowest common denominator and DO NOT offer back doors.
Back doors accessible by scammers are bad for the same reasons back doors accessible by governments are.
> This really is "no sale of knives" type stuff. That sounds ridiculous, right? Because it is, and we let Apple get away with murder.
Apple's more like a shop that declines to sell knives. There are other shops that will sell you one.
Children are either not allowed to have devices, or they have them but locked down with parental controls (hopefully).
Apple could easily have a separate mode for this. Maybe there's some overlap with lockdown mode where it can be bundled together. There is no reason to force it on everyone except to benefit Apple.
How many children have you met lately?
Why should children be punished with a lifetime of shitty ingrained behaviors just because they were born to shitty parents who wouldn't do the right thing? I'd rather not create the Eloi and Morlocks from HG Wells.
Okay but again we cannot form all technology to only work for people with cognitive issues and nobody else. Again, this is ridiculous, there's no other way to describe it. It's just not a reasonable viewpoint and I feel it's a bit insane I even have to argue against it.
Look, it's great if we have the option to lock these phones down for more vulnerable people. What we CANNOT do is make the entire world locked down. It's not reasonable.
> Back doors accessible by scammers are bad for the same reasons back doors accessible by governments are.
My mistake, these are front doors. Not back doors.
> Apple's more like a shop that declines to sell knives. There are other shops that will sell you one.
NO, there are not, because Apple chooses to only allow their app store. The market we are talking about here is not "all smartphones". It's "the market of software available for iPhones", in which they hold 100% control over. This should be legislated against.
We can take their needs into consideration, just as we legally require businesses to put wheelchair ramps in.
> NO, there are not, because Apple chooses to only allow their app store. The market we are talking about here is not "all smartphones". It's "the market of software available for iPhones", in which they hold 100% control over. This should be legislated against.
Should Gucci have to sell Coach handbags? Should Ford have to sell Toyotas?
Yes, I agree, and I said exactly that.
> Should Gucci have to sell Coach handbags? Should Ford have to sell Toyotas?
If Gucci was a Walmart, then yes. If Walmart claimed to be a grocery store, and exclusively served only Walmart goods, that's a problem.
There's a difference between a brand and a marketplace. Apple is a brand. The App Store is a marketplace. The marketplace should be relatively free, in the market sense.
In addition, these are general computation devices. Some people disagree, I don't care, they're obviously wrong. It's not like a washing machine. These are supposed to be for general software and computing purposes, much like your PC. But they aren't, because unlike your PC, they are nonfree.
The bigger thing that I'm kind of hinting at is: we are not trapped into some make believe structure we have to live by. You think Apple shouldn't open their app store. That's just a belief, and one I reject. We can, and should, force their hand. We do it ALLLL the time with corporations, it's very common.
Just because things have worked one way, doesn't mean they should continue to work that way. We can change things at any time, if it is for the better. If we decided we should pass legislation to force Guccie to also sell Prada, then sure. I say why the fuck not? If that's what consumers want, then we should do it. The consumer is king. I give less than zero fucks what Apple wants. If it hurts Apple's bottom line, I still don't care. In fact, I'd argue that if we're hurting Apple's bottom line then we're probably doing something right. I will always side with the consumer 100% of the time.
Why? Trader Joes and Aldi both do precisely that. No one minds.
And then, billions of users cry out in pain as their private data is hoovered into the panopticon in the cloud.
That's not how data collection works? It's Apple's responsibility to prevent their application runtime from exposing private data or unnecessary entitlements. Enabling sideloading does not prevent Apple from protecting user data any more than the App Store does.
Then it would be legal for someone to develop and give-away a patch for the Meta app...
Or they accept the push notification dialog on some random site and start getting "COMPUTER HACKED, CALL MICROSOFT AT FAKE NUMBER" notifications that look like they come from the OS.
It would be foolproof, maybe the most trustworthy system ever conceived.
Yes, in an ideal world, that might work but most people don't actually know they have malware. That's the point of the malware! And it's not like you can say "no internet for you until you replace your TV[0]" because that's an extremely quick way to the courts and a customer reputation below the toilet.
(Ignoring the "who pays for that?" question because that is a whole 'nother can of worms.)
[0] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/fbi-google-disrupt-proxy-network-a...
Last time I was in a bank branch they told me to go to the website for my issue.
And this sort of attitude is exactly what needs to change.
But what's Grandma supposed to do in the meantime?
"Sorry, try somewhere else" is the procedure.
Do you think I oppose this?
Removing end user control, repairability, and hackability/repurposing (all related) should be the very last resort, not the first!
That fits your pattern elsewhere in this thread of not actually engaging with what others are saying to slay strawmen.
Over? No. Regulation and some controls work hand in hand as mitigations.
Last resorts are last resorts because they infringe on core freedoms. And your “controls” are equivalent to removing individual ownership of devices. This is a step too far towards a post-ownership society and joint corporate-state control of the individual’s means of communication and participation in society.
In my opinion, the Apple app store should actually be FAR more curated than it is, and far less curated options should be equally available. The Apple App store (and the Google app store for that matter), should be a relatively small list of apps that have extremely high standards and guarantees. It should essentially be impossible for spammy bullshit to get into these places. User-controlled, parental control like options should determine whether or not other app sources can be installed from (including allowing for specific other sources, so that app source control can be granular and detailed. I should be allowed to add FDroid but nothing else for example).
Done. Problem solved. Everyone is happy. Grandma is safe and Johnny has control over his phone.
But of course, that assumes that keeping Granny safe is actually the reason. Facially obviously, it is not, and is in fact entirely pretextual.
1. The vast majority of people are Grandma, and they do not have a Johnny available to administer their tech. Most people are not technical.
2. The vast majority of Grandmas will follow instructions on a “how do I share cute photo” website even when that website directs them to dig deep into configuration settings and ignore six “are you sure you want to allow this app to fully remotely control your device?” warnings. Even if Grandma has a healthy suspicion of scams, when she is instead trying to accomplish a goal she will suddenly prove quite adept at giving software with questionable provenance root access to her life.
I hope you're right, but I'm not sure they will. The less locked-down WinXP and early Android era was ... really really bad in terms of nontechnical people getting hacked/scammed. And bad actors are also innovating, so the target of what people have to learn is moving: now we have synthetic AI voice scams, easy-to-create full clones of popular websites that harvest credentials, an explosion of 0days that let people run RATs that hassle elders for their MFA codes, and so on.
Like, I'm 100% with you that baby-proofing the world is an unattainable, patronizing, and negative-externality-laden goal. We shouldn't do that. But we shouldn't go full libertarian "you're on your own; toughen up" either; I think we have a lot of data that indicates that the harms of that approach are both high-magnitude and high-volume.
Anarchy |--------O-| Goo Goo Ga Ga
And people are arguing we should be moving further right. It's ridiculous, we all need to be candid and recognize this will not work
GGP's idea of making it more commonplace to have a "Johnny" helping people with their tech needs to prevent accidents could work socially, if there are ways for communities to create more people willing to do that.
Worldwide legal penalties for spamming/scamming could grow more teeth, increasing the likelihood of bad outcomes for people that make malware or questionable apps.
Software distribution systems could standardize on better systems of provenance and ownership handoff to further technically harden against "good extension sold out to an evil maintainer" or "github credential leak let a bad guy publish an artifact"-type attacks.
Cooldown periods for users trying to grant questionable access patterns could be imposed, though that might feel too baby-proof for some.
On-device permission boundaries could be modeled in an "XOR" way: apps distributed from Apple's walled garden could be disallowed from approving data sharing with apps users install from other repositories. That's Apple's prerogative (they own the distribution and vouch for at least some of the quality of the app store apps), but doesn't prevent users from installing parallel ecosystems if they want.
Something that's very paternalistic, but doesn't involve baby-proofing what's possible, is the idea of credentialing users. You need a driver's license to operate a car. In the US, you need a (much easier to get) food handling license to commercially process food. The latter's a short briefing and test of comparable effort to those mandatory corporate anti-phishing trainings that already-technical people hate. Perhaps some users could benefit from that as a prerequisite to installing non-trusted software.
For vetted walled gardens like the App Store, further improving the granularity of and required justifications for permission requests as providers have been doing might help. "This poker app wants to access all of your saved contacts and photos" becomes "this poker app wants you to select a single profile photo and up to 5 contacts a day to add as opponents, after which access is revoked" or whatnot. This only works if App Store reviewers get serious about rejecting apps for overbroad permissions requests and explain their rationale to app developers, which would require Apple and friends to spend a lot of money to enable. Fortunately, they have insane margins. Less fortunately, their shareholders wouldn't go for this unless forced by regulation or similar.
Anything that helps with threat attribution. If Grandma can install an app from a random URL, and then gets hacked 6 months later, it'd be great if something got in her face that loudly indicated that the decision to install the untrusted app was the root cause of her compromise and some "do you want to disable the ability to do this in the future/require a phonecall to $provider to turn it back on?"-type hint.
For apps that spend money, further integrating pattern-aware anti-fraud and spend caps with payment APIs so that e.g. a microtransaction app that got hacked can't suddenly spend $100 where the user typically spent $5/month. Banks are already starting to get proactive/argumentative about unexpected transaction patterns a la "sir, are you sure you want to send $5000 in your first overseas money wire? Can you tell us more about that transaction? Are you aware of this common fraud?"
...and so on.
The only way to 100% prevent scams is to remove the potential entirely. There are scams, infinite actually, right now, on iPhones. Do you support that? Surely not, so we should lock iPhones down more no? Ideally, we ban smartphones altogether, to prevent scams. Oh you don't support that? Well come back when one of your relatives loses 1 million dollars.
Look, we can take steps to prevent scams, and we do. What we should NOT do is go so extreme that people cannot even use their devices the way they want that they paid for. This is anti-consumer. If I want to install some software, I should be able to. It is not Apple's responsibility to baby me, baby you, and baby the entire world and say "no no you can only use our approved software!"
Especially when some of that approved software is... wait for it... malware! Yes, there is quite a lot of malware on the Apple App Store and the Play Store. But I can't install open-source software I've audited myself on my iPhone? How strange.
It appears to me this has nothing to do with scams, and everything to do with control, censorship, and profiteering.
Unlike app developers, banks are by default directly liable for fraud that happens on their system. In many cases, even when someone gets their bank to send money to a scammer, they can still get that money back. Since the bank doesn't want to risk regulatory reprisal, they have a lower threshold for spending money to make customers whole. Exceptions and subtleties abound here, but the underlying incentive structure is very different: the broker of the sensitive resource (money, for banks) is often held responsible for mis-use of that resource. How would we do that for e.g. apps that store your password in plaintext and then get hacked?
Relatedly, banks have thus started adopting the practice of blocking and calling/talking to customers about suspicious transactions. You can still authorize it if you really push, but you have to talk to someone with expertise about fraud risk, and have to spend some time doing it (which helps a lot with the "urgency" dimension of scams). Most permission approval prompts on phones/computers have no such human intervention or time-delay option, even if you might want them to.
> The only way to 100% prevent scams is to remove the potential entirely. There are scams, infinite actually, right now, on iPhones. Do you support that? Surely not, so we should lock iPhones down more no?
Nobody here has the goal of preventing 100% of scams. The ideal amount of fraud on these platforms is not zero (https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...). Rather, fraud is still extremely common and difficult to disincentivize. We want to reduce that as much as possible while not imposing overly-onerous restrictions. The discussion is about what counts as "as much as possible" or "overly-onerous", not whether we should ban phones or banks.
> I can't install open-source software I've audited myself on my iPhone
I hope you understand you're in a very tiny minority of people who can do that, using a device designed for people who cannot do that, and whose behavior if permitted to do what you're after has a proven history of causing significant damage to individuals (who lose their savings) and shared resources (sites DDoSed by end-user-device malware, hospitals that can't provide care because someone let ransomware onto a computer, and so on).
We have highly secure repos on other platforms. I would argue the Debian repos are much, much more secure than the App Store. The safety and security argument against it is, simply put, wrong. It is incorrect, it should not be humored. The fact people genuinely believe only Apple can securely audit software is ridiculous, poorly thought out, and obvious corporate propaganda.
If we want iPhones to be more secure, we need to take a closer look at the permission system. What we don't need to do is let Apple continue their profiteering. And make no mistake, the singular goal of the App Store is profiteering. Security is not a goal, otherwise they would only allow open source apps that they audit. But no, they allow closed source apps which use private APIs and they do not give a fuck. And that's why there's quite a lot of malware on the App Store, and much less in the Debian repos. Despite one being run by a multi-trillion dollar corporation, and the other being run by volunteers. It's time to call spades, spades.
and i am surprised that apps like "Night Sky" (great app, no affiliation) made it past review if the app store reviewers are incapable of telling the difference.
https://darkhours.io/ does look really cool, i hope they get this sorted out.
> the App Review Board and the Review Board responded that they determined the original rejection was valid because, I shit you not, “We understand that the app includes a live tarot reading feature.”
So that's it, they need to remove the live tarot reading. Which to me while not being astrology, isn't much better.
>So that's it, they need to remove the live tarot reading.
dark hours doesnt have live tarot reading.
> It has no tarot function, no horoscopes, and nothing that I, or anyone else I’ve asked, would associate with astrology.
Further down he states there was never any tarot reading function. So how can he remove a function the app never had and thus a function the reviewer never could have seen?
And opensource, launched months ago. Full source and commit history here: https://github.com/mbeher2200/DarkHours
Developers are wondering if they are the only ones on their forums: https://developer.apple.com/forums/topics/app-store-distribu...
On the other hand I have a personal iOS app that normally doesn't take long to approve that's been waiting two weeks.
> In a sworn deposition in the Epic lawsuit, Phillip Shoemaker, the former head of the App Review team, said employees in his department generally did not have a technical background in computer coding. They needed to know how to use a Mac and an iPhone, he said.
> “Qualifications were that they could breathe, they could think,” he said. And they typically worked at the Apple “Genius Bar” at the company’s retail stores. It typically took about 13 minutes to review a new app, Shoemaker said in the deposition.
Nothing about level one app review should need coding skills. Appeals, maybe, but even there, it's almost never about the code.
Anything involving technical code review of apps on Apple's scale should be automated anyway.
That's not what the court testimony said. Could think does not imply could think critically, especially not when preceded by "could breathe", which is an absurdly low bar. Might as well say, "not literally dead".
> “Qualifications were that they could breathe, they could think,” he said.
“They could think” implies critical thinking skills.
Then the next sentence says they usually work at the Genius Bar, which is not at all an entry level role.
No, it does not. What do you think "they could breathe" implies? That they were athletes?
It’s clear that the meaning of the quote is that Apple doesn’t look for strict technical qualifications (“they could breathe”), they instead look for people who show an ability to think critically (“they could think”).
The passage also says that the app reviewers tend to be Genius Bar employees, which is a second level role within an already competitive high tier retailer. I.e., Apple retail rejects a lot of retail employees that go on to work for other retailers that have lower pay and benefits (most of the rest of the retail industry), and then out of those people who get accepted, many are rejected to work in the Genius Bar handling repairs and troubleshooting.
"Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
By the way, I'm a longtime App Store developer, so my criticism of the App Store is not shallow.
> It’s clear that the meaning of the quote is that Apple doesn’t look for strict technical qualifications (“they could breathe”), they instead look for people who show an ability to think critically (“they could think”).
I don't think that's clear. I would point out that the testimony was under oath, on penalty of perjury, so it would be personally dangerous for Shoemaker to lie. I interpret Shoemaker's remarks as admitting that Apple basically needed warm bodies for the job and didn't have strict qualifications. This aligns with my own experience as an App Store developer, dealing with Apple reviewers, who often seem completely clueless.
With regard to the Genius Bar, the term "genius" has also been more marketing than anything else. Moreover, in the context, I believe that Shoemaker was testifying about the origins of the App Store. In other words, in 2008 when Apple opened the App Store, they recruited reviewers from among current employees at Apple retail stores. Shoemaker said that reviewers "typically" worked at the Genius Bar, not that reviewers invariably or were required to have worked at the Genius Bar. The App Store itself was thrown together very quickly, after the "sweet solution" of web apps fell on dead ears. Steve Jobs hadn't originally wanted third-party apps on the iPhone. It's unclear whether Apple today is still recruiting App Store reviewers from their retail stores, and of course the volume of submitted apps today is vastly greater than the relatively small number back in 2008.
I’m also an iOS developer and while there are a lot of things about the app review process that should be changed, I wouldn’t describe any of my reviewers as clueless. Maybe you’ve submitted more apps than me, though, and maybe you got a bad one. Like you said, app volumes are huge, so that’s probably a statistical inevitability regardless of company hiring and training practices.
Where exactly does "to be a contrarian" or "to hate on Apple" come from my words? That was bad faith psychological speculation, not an interpretation of my words.
You said that I purposefully misinterpreted the meaning of the quote. That is literally assuming bad faith. I'm not sure what you think assuming bad faith is, if not that.
We had a client whose website geoblocked non-US IPs and failed several rounds of review until we gave up and put a copy of their privacy policy on S3.
How many great apps are rejected, but build by people without reach?
I'm a fan of letting users add repos from vendors they trust, so there isn't one centralized gatekeeper.
many years ago we made a list of malware apps on the Mac App Store:
https://www.corecode.io/_malware_on_the_macappstore.html
(yes, the list was made after being disgruntled because totally legitimate apps were refused for nonsense reasons just like in this story)
Even the good ones, looking at you Valve.
Am I happy and satisfied customer of some companies? Yes. Not a fan, though.
I pointed out that there were a couple other E-rated apps that show the exact same image, and many more T-rated ones that only warn of "In-App Purchases" — no "Violence" label. One of the latter is the official Google TV app [0], so I sent some screenshots of that, and asked if maybe they were "crushing the competition" by avoiding their own review process, to see if that would escalate my case (no such luck).
[0] The image is still the same in the Google TV app, and Google Search surfaces the image in question S1 E10: https://www.google.com/search?q=landman+season+1
https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
There's a Wikipedia article with some history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrology_and_astronomy
I imagine astronomers have been sighing resignedly at dinner parties for a couple of millenia:
In the Hellenistic world, the Greek words 'astrologia' and 'astronomia' were often used interchangeably, but they were conceptually not the same.
In his compilatory work Etymologiae [c. 625], Isidore of Seville noted explicitly the difference between the terms astronomy and astrology (Etymologiae, III, xxvii) and the same distinction appeared later in the texts of Arabian writers.
"Astronomy? You don't really believe in all that nonsense do you? Jane, this guy believes those horoscopes in the paper!"
Sigh
They deny great apps, fail to fix their mistakes, and leave heaps and heaps of actively malicious apps in place, in the top 40 in every category.
And we pay them 10x cc processing fees (30% instead of 3%) for this.
It’s pure rentseeking bullshit, and it goes against everything that made Apple Apple. It’s an actual tragedy.
Post AI this starts to feel absurd and look if OpenAI release a hardware device with an App Store will the process be days to weeks of review or will it be vibe code it in 40 minutes hit publish and it’s available to every device in 2 minutes?
Yeah think software is thankfully going towards a world where bureaucracy isn’t respected.
The apple decides what the box or square in your hand can do era is over.
I have a terminal in the web app that I use to code on my laptop. I wanted to make a native app for my phone, but using Tailscale and just accessing the website on my phone is way better and I’m not dependent on app stores at all.
Exactly what I thought at some point. Apple, or whoever they outsource their app store reviews to, certainly try hard to beat that kind of idealism out of people. I let my developer subscription run out and moved on to make web apps only. Never looked back.
He was against the unofficial Mac port of Notepad++ but that had many problems other than being AI-assisted.
to me craft is a human quality, I don't look at Ikea cabinets and praise their craft for example, and I'll admit that some of them are quite nice... it's just not the same process
They are insanely, glacially slow.
Then I read more and realized it was just stupidity.
Has Apple really sunk that low?
I don’t understand why tarot reading apps are banned, can someone enlighten me?
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#des...
> Don’t submit apps that are indistinguishable from what's already widely available. Opportunistically creating variants of existing app categories or popular apps degrades App Store discovery, reduces overall app quality, and harms both users and developers. Certain kinds of apps, such as dating, flashlight, sound effects, wallpaper, simple timers, and fortune telling, are well established on the App Store and we will not accept new submissions unless they offer a meaningfully different or improved experience.
Sad to say this, but this has been known since forever.
I'm good to make the description complaint, of course, but it seems the reviewer immediately halts as soon as they encounter any issue. Would have been nice to get both feedback points on the first response, especially given how long it can take to get back to the top of the queue.
At the end of the day, I regret my choice to use the App Store at all.
The source code and commit history can be seen here. https://github.com/mbeher2200/DarkHours
Apple is anti-dev, pro control of the income stream, and only interested in supporting devs that are all in on the cult.
The fact that the dev made a web version with all the same functionality just proves we don't need an app store nor Apple to gatekeep it.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=33623...
TRICKSTER
This entity is a demon-like clown that plays tricks on its victims. It is accompanied by Jack n Boxes that are triggered by cards he leaves around that offer good and bad results - the good result being the box that has a symbol that relates to the card you pick up. Instead of just killing you when he catches up, you have to go through what I call a "Just Dance" challenge. Hit the WASD, or whatever your keybinds are, when the indication reaches the box.
We ran into an interesting situation. After long hours we could not get the escape key in the egyptan level. We have a clown, where we have to follow the cards. We can obtain every fuse, we finsih with the objectives, but there are not any card left to find, and the exit key was not it the middle of the lasers ( a mystery card was there). And one additional info, we also could not found the key for administrator 1... any suggestion ?
This is just one property named "Dark Hours"; there are horror films and mystery novels, and while it's a cromulent name for astronomy, just looking at the name gave me feelings of spiritualism or prophecy, on top of those cool nights watching Perseids with Dad and sister, in the flat field.
https://nic.io/whois-search.htm?domain_name=darkhours.io
Your website, darkhours dot io, is six days old. That is, it was created on August 1st, and it was not spotted by web.archive.org, until August 2, 2026. So your "Dark Hours" naming is really, really late to the game, so to speak. You should change your name before the game-makers of "Piece of Cake Studio" find you and send a cease and desist to change your domain name, before .io registrar revokes it, which appears to be in Colorado and/or the British Indian Ocean, for all intents and purposes.
I'm not defending Apple at all (I'm a developer, I've not specifically worked on apps for iDevices, however I've worked closely with those that take our platforms and tie them into those apps at many companies and startups)
I've also not finished reading the article, however right away, based on what I've read, I see the problem. Apple reviews a thousands upon thousands of apps a day, and the folks reviewing those apps (and now, AI) aren't going to continue to review an app when they see a potential violation. It is up to the app developer to be clear and concise.
Apple is a pain to deal with, I get that. However, I see why it was rejected. Continuing to read the article now.
EDIT: read the rest of it. My take is that they are probably employing AI based upon the odd response (which is dumb, also note, Apple has been using forms of machine learning for years to assist with this stuff. When I say AI, I specifically refer to LLMs).
Something that I think folks really need to pay attention to, however, is the first impression. The app reviewer doesn't just hit a reject button and call it a day. They take notes. Notes that aren't shared with you, just among folks that may review it again in the future. When it is re-reviewed, those notes are taken into consideration and given a ton of weight. That is why it is important to give a perfect presentation the first time around. If you have 30 seconds to re-review an app that was rejected and you have notes (and possibly a screenshot or two? I don't know if Apple does that part) of what was presented during the previous review, you aren't going to do a whole bunch of investigating if it looks like nothing has changed. You have deadlines that impact your performance review, you will move on and rubber stamp the re-review. The next level up will take slightly longer, etc.
Sadly this is unavoidable as constellations are used in astronomy and astrology. They both also use letters and numbers. That doesn't mean they're the same thing.
> Something that I think folks really need to pay attention to, however, is the first impression. The app reviewer doesn't just hit a reject button and call it a day.
With respect I think you need to reread the actual blog post about the app rejection. It's pretty clear the app reviewer took a quick look and rejected it without any understanding at all. I don't know why you think these reviewers are so conscientious, they're line workers and sometimes they just get sick of the grind and it's easy to reject. They're human.