1. I invest loads of time and effort developing an app
2. Apple rejects it
-or-
2. Apple approves it
3. I ship a new update
4. Apple rejects the update and now decides my app should have been rejected retroactively.
I'm especially concerned about what happened to Hey and others but my customers are demanding smartphone apps and there are still limits to what can be done with a mobile web browser.
iSH tried to circumvent this with a technicality, and it seems to have initially "worked", but I think it's a poor example of an app unfairly/inconsistently targeted.
OP is just saying 99% of apps being developed are clearly within the rules, rather than really pushing against the boundaries of what is allowed.
I don't think I'm competing with Apple at all today, but who knows what they're planning for their next features?
We will ultimately build more apps and invest more time in supporting and improving our current apps.
Although I could see how they are trying to appease antitrust regulators with this move - although they should have gone with 0 - 2% range for that. 15% is a substantial markup to price consumers would pay for using apples monopolized mobile software distribution store.
I doubt this was the aim. It suspect its aim was to fend off all this scrutiny on their App Store business.
Who knows whether it'll work in avoiding attention from law makers and regulators, but this will do nothing to address the developer's concerns and problem with the App Store.
As counterexamples: Apple sell Logic, yet it has numerous competitors, also all fairly successful: ProTools, Live, Cubase, Reaper, Ardour, FruityLoops. Apple give their customers Notes, Reminders and Mail for free, on all their devices (i.e. you don't even need to get hold of apps for these functions), and yet we also have Evernote, Notion, Airmail, Spark etc etc.
Does the App Store monopoly significantly change the nature of app competition? I'm not convinced, but I'm open to learning about it.
What Apple is really trying to do is prevent apps from changing their behavior after they review them in a silent way to bypass the usual process. The real issue here is that their guidelines don't reflect this and this confuses the reviewers (and evidently commenters here on Hacker News). What needs to happen here is Apple clarifies their guidelines so that we don't have rules that can be inconsistently enforced.
(If you need more to convince you, I'll point you at the stuff I wrote when that was going on: https://saagarjha.com/blog/2020/11/08/fixing-section-2-5-2/).
When we made the appeal for iSH we correctly surmised that the point of the rule that was cited was to prevent apps from bypassing App Store review, which iSH does not do in the slightest. Taken from the real perspective from which the app should have been judged, iSH is not at the boundary at all; instead it's the apps that do things like undisclosed A/B testing and feature flags to hide things from review. So what happens is developers like us who are actually clearly within the rules as they are meant to be applied get caught in limbo at the whim of reviewers who misunderstand the guidelines because they aren't written as they are supposed to be enforced.
So now the developer is stuck -- he can't update his app on the Mac App Store, and what recourse does he have as a 1-man-shop vs Apple?! =|
As a developer I find it absurd, as a consumer [who bought the app on MAS and wondered why I had the non-latest version], I find it absolutely baffling & anti-consumer.
It still doesn't solve the fundamental issue.
Let users have the option of using third-party stores, but losing Apple's safety net. They claim users want that net. If so, the third party stores will go bust. If not, they're simply being anti-consumer.
Apple gets all the headlines, and certainly gets more chatter on HN, but they aren’t alone in this bullshit. As an example... Fortnite was also banned by Google.
This is true, but perhaps not as many as some may think! Progressive Web Applications can now do quite a lot on mobile and tablets, with a notable exception of push notifications on iOS.
They are an increasingly interesting option for those whose use case allows it.
https://simplabs.com/blog/2020/06/10/the-state-of-pwa-suppor...
Apple provides screenshots and human written explanation on rejection. I have even talked on the phone with review team several times to discuss the problem.
Yes, it sucks that the update may be rejected by some reviewer and another one may approve the same update.
I don’t know how it is in the Land of the Free, but in Europe most margins on food are in the single digits all the way down. It’s true that small producers are squeezed at both ends, but at least there are market dynamics in place - if one supermarket chain takes too much, you go and sell to the other one, and the consumer can get it anyway.
Double-digit and triple-digit margins are the reason the software world is now dominating the economy. Most other sectors can only dream of that.
No, this is very unique to Apple, and only on iOS. Its the reason why iPhone web browsers have to use Safari under the hood.
Distributors make a pittance for a relatively risky bet on delivering fruit and veggies. Margins are usually below 10%, often close to 5%, and definitely nowhere near 30%. On top of that, there's the added risk of damage happening to the goods in transit and storage, voiding the entire profit. Google and Apple make money by sitting on their asses and taking a slice off a developer's cheque, which is more akin to a usurious mafia slumlord rather than a tech company. Small farmers are on the short end of a stick, but only because by nature small landholdings are not profitable, and farming is a scale operation for production of a commoditized good by nature. App development is not a scale operation - a developer can be easily profitable with a small group of high-paying customers.
If you want a better experiment, have a play version with normal fees, and a sideload version where v-bucks are cheaper.
It wasn't a simple matter of "Apple releases product that does X, then bans all products that do X from the App Store;" the products they banned had to use some seriously sketchy tactics to monitor and restrict other apps on the iPhone without system-level access.
Without push notifications, PWAs are not really viable and Apple knows it. Apple wants developers to use the App Store and be subject to their fees and review process.
At least Google supports push notifications for PWAs, making them a legitimate alternative on Android.
As an iPhone owner, the inability for PWAs to have notifications is probably my single biggest gripe at the moment.
I wrote more about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643185
Apple clearly thought they were valuable enough to customers to keep around before the release of Screen Time, even with the sketchy method they had to use.
Apologies for the Italian links but that’s all I could find for now:
https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2020/05/14/frutta-e-verdura...
There are few intermediaries and they get to dictate prices, mandatory discounts, and run double-discounted auctions (which the legislature is trying to make illegal.) If you get to outsmart them selling to another distributor (as if they’re not conniving already) good luck selling your next load of perishable goods before it rots.
Also brick & mortar shops make hideous markups to cover for their poor selection, inventory and commercial space rent (so sure, it doesn’t line only their pockets but for the final consumer it doesn’t make much difference.)
As do I, an end-user of Apple's platforms.
Safari PWAs protect your privacy better than native apps, because Safari trusts no one. The App Store review process is trying to find a malicious needle in a haystack because iOS by default trusts native apps more than it should, due to the existence of that nebulous review process. Apple is slowly locking down native apps with each successive iOS version... but PWAs have always been extremely private, and they're still the gold standard as far as I've seen.
PWAs are actually completely isolated from each other and from the rest of Safari, so there is no cross-contamination for tracking purposes.
If you don’t want more choice and more privacy... that’s up to you. I really don’t know what to tell you.
PWAs aren't the "wild west" that sideloading apps would be, yet you're trying to use the classic anti-sideloading argument against PWAs, and that argument simply doesn't work here. Apple has supported PWAs since before there was even an Apple App Store for native apps!
PWAs already exist, and PWAs are already extremely private. Apple just needs to give PWAs push notification support. Users would still have complete control over notifications, just like any native app.
Apple heavily pushes native apps because of the profit they get from it, not because of concerns about user privacy. They have already built Safari to protect your privacy on the open web.
I was more than glad to receive a f..g phone call from the reviewer telling me why he will reject my update, why is it this way and what I can do to make it pass and give me his phone number to call if I need further assistance.
I become die hard Apple AppStore review process fanboy by getting a rejection!
You know what happens when you get a rejection from some other place? You get a template e-mail with no specifics, good luck figure it out. Tough luck if your livelihood depends on it.
That said, briefly looking over some scripting/IDE environments not from Apple, it looks like most of them ship "batteries included" and don't allow for content to be pulled from online.
It seems to me the equivalent of iSH shouldn't be, say, a Python interpreter/IDE, but a Python runtime including pip and the ability to pull modules from pypi.org.
OTOH, Python itself is so reflective, I imagine there's probably some way to self-inject modules within a script, if you have any sort of web access. And since you can tunnel TCP over DNS, even a hostname lookup is enough. So I'll conceded the point, since most scripting runtimes probably have some kind of EVAL routine to invoke the interpreter, or a porthole into the interpreter's bytecode.
That said, my own original point was about developers/businesses feeling uncertainty about Apple's rules, and worrying if an app would even be accepted. I feel like almost any developer would instinctively thing iSH's premise of being a program interpreter for the Linux ABI would be rejected by Apple.
Whether or not the underlying rule is fairly applied aside, it's clearly something Apple wants to prohibit. Albeit, I'm kind of baffled myself at why, especially in iSH's case where the emulated runtime is completely separate from the "real program text", with no escape hatches out IIRC. Seems utterly ridiculous to me, especially when you can accomplish something similar in WebKit/JSC I'm sure, just not offline. :-/
iOS has always been designed as not to offer APIs that can be used for particularly harmful purposes.
If I never release it for iOS at all, you're also not welcome to buy it through the App Store! See how that works? The developer/publisher obviously does get a say in what happens to their app... this is not even slightly shocking. Apple can't force me to develop and release an app for the App Store, which is what you seem to be hoping?
However, there are many publishers competing for your attention. You have a choice, and many of those developers will always choose to use the App Store, since a lot of users browse the App Store. Users vote with their wallets, and developers who don't publish on the App Store would be keenly aware of the uphill battle they might have in convincing users to download their PWA.
> It enables publisher choice and creates this loop where publishers who have a customer bases just move to the store with the fewest restrictions and fees. It's a race to the bottom where the user loses.
Android has supported both sideloading and PWAs with push notifications for many years. Ever notice how the Google Play Store isn't a ghost town? Most Android users still only download apps through the Google Play Store. This is fine -- the users have made their choice, and that's the important thing.
Your doomsday, slippery slope hypothesis of developers vacating the Play Store en masse never occurred on Android. It seems equally unlikely to occur on iOS, unless Apple seriously mismanages their App Store. Still, users and developers should have the choice for meaningful apps to be distributed as PWAs, which essentially requires push notification support.
I closed the phone and 5 min later I received the rejection together with the talking points that we went through on the phone.
I also suspect that Apple is trying to make sure that the same app is reviewed by the same employees. I think I dealt with the same 2 people in multiple review issues in later updates.
Sometimes it was frustrating when I have a rejection about something that was previously approved but it was resolved every time when I explain the problem and the solution in the notes to the reviewer section. I think I have a friendly reviewer that sends my updates straight to the store in 6 hours and there's another one who is being hard on me and needs to be convinced every time. Regardless, I am happy to be able to explain things to people.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/22/fortnite-...
This isn't just for the cut Apple takes from App Store sales. It's also about differentiating their operating system and hardware from competitors products too. Operating system and hardware matter a lot less if the battlefield is the browser. So I think the argument that native apps are key and essential to Apple's existence is a sound one.
Google for example is pulling in a totally different direction, towards a world where only Chrome matters. In China, it appears that WeChat won that battle already.
I think it's great having so many different and opposing visions for what computing may look like. It would be a great tragedy if we ever ended up in a situation where there was only one remaining vision of what computing should be (unless maybe it was RMS's vision, which I think would be pretty good).
Because of that, I think it would be a mistake for Apple to act against its own interest by giving PWA's any kind of breathing room.
Also I may be wrong, but I suspect that users don't really care for or about PWA's, and that the only people who want push notifications for PWA's are PWA developers.
I think you're taking "trivial" to mean "completely frictionless with no downsides" which is not the sense in which I intended it to be taken.
To quote myself above:
> It's not a contradiction to say both "sideloading makes banning from the the Play Store less of an issue" and "it's better to be on the Play Store".
Your whole comment is predicated on the interpretation of one word. Apple just needs to support push notifications for PWAs if they want to make PWAs useful and competitive, and it would be helpful for Apple in the antitrust battles that they seem to be facing. That's what I meant by "need". Previously, Apple also needed to add offline support, but they eventually did... so now that isn't a "need" for PWAs to be useful and competitive, even if Apple's offline support for PWAs is limited.
Apple doesn't "need" to implement it from whatever abstract interpretation of the word "need" that you're using... I'm not saying Apple will starve to death if they don't implement it -- it isn't a fundamental business "need" that they currently have.
They should do it, and I really want them to do it.
Access to consumer markets is either via a looooong chain of small, inefficient and parasitic intermediaries or via the GDO, the logistics organizations of these few supermarket chains.
So the farmers are squeezed, they fall in debt and go bankrupt, or sell out to big landlords; and both tend to employ illegal immigrants under inhuman working conditions to meet the prices set by the aforementioned.
All the browser-makers successfully compete on features, as proved by the continued existence of multiple browsers on the App Store. Hell, Firefox can even afford to cannibalise its own market with two versions of Firefox (FF, and FF Focus).
Furthermore all the big name browser makers sell their offering at "free". In my view, this makes browsers an outlier in any discussion of Apple's anti-competitive behaviour. It doesn't shut down the conversation, just takes browsers out of it.