Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

Looks nice but it doesn't solve my fundamental problem:

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.

This really isn't a problem in practice, unless you are going out of your way to try to bend the rules set in place, especially about sales.

Unless you're competing with something Apple is planning to bring out (parental control apps before screen time stats, etc).

I don't think I'm competing with Apple at all today, but who knows what they're planning for their next features?

Surely this is true for all developers, at any size? And also just about any product, or service, in any industry?

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.

When Apple added Screen Time, they banned other competing apps.

If I recall correctly, the apps they banned were doing things like abusing the VPN function to capture all traffic from the phone, and using that as their mechanism for blocking certain websites (or maybe it was MDM they were abusing...?).

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.

And, instead of providing APIs to help make those apps less sketchy... Apple decided it would be easier to just ban them.

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.

Because those APIs can be used for extremely sketchy activity.

Many APIs can be used for sketchy things. Supposedly, that’s one thing the App Store review process is meant to catch.

You can't detect everything in review.

iOS has always been designed as not to offer APIs that can be used for particularly harmful purposes.