Avoid the Apple App Store (opens in new tab)

Behind the cutesy facade is a rapacious, consumer-hostile monster. The facade is paper-thin, and it's only a matter of time until you rub it the wrong way and it flakes off, then the monster will eat your money and anything you've entrusted to it. Apple products eat people's data, hungrily and mercilessly, then the company blames you when it loses it.

It will get the world hooked on their fashionable products then make them less and less usable. Those little mini-stereo to lightning dongles are the worst-made products imaginable. Guess what you can get a mini-stereo port on? An iPod Touch. Very brave, Apple.

Instead of offering developers a real userland, you get forced onto zsh because Apple would rather die than ship GPL later than v2.

Don't get it twisted, Apple hates you, and loves only money. It's only a matter of time until each and every Apple user is taught that.

If you had read the article you would know that this is another case of a developer being summarily dismissed with little explanation. This kind of story is rather common among iOS developers and it shouldn't happen. In this specific example they said "no copycats", without really explaining what does and does not make a game a "copycat". So the only assumption the developer could make is Apple has an internal policy of "nobody is allowed to make games in which you guess words" because they got embarrassed by a news article on Wordle clones.

Whether or not you think this particular developer is justified or not is immaterial. It could be the case that you just happen to really, really hate Wordle clones. However, there is still an issue here: Apple is very much non-communicative with, if not outright hostile to, smaller developers. I doubt you really intended to say "if you want my money you will be a large monopolistic enterprise with a dedicated App Store compliance department and the market power to embarrass Apple", but that's the implication of what you wrote.

>The intense planning on their part to mess up a thing I love just because they couldn’t make their money… Oh. Nevermind.

And... what's wrong with that? Apps take time and money to develop[0]. These kinds of no-comment rejections are Apple basically throwing your work in the garbage. It's not "hey you need to change this in order to get approved", it's just a flat "no".

[0] More generally, I'm getting the same vibes from that last comment that I do from really angry pirates trying to justify piracy on the grounds that "publishers only care about money".

Or did you just want to do an "angry soap box lecture" without much relevance to the article?

edit:

Just to clarify, this was not an article about Apple having rules, strict rules, or even content curation. This was an article about Apple rolling the die when deciding to accept you or not, and not caring about quality in the slightest.

> What I don’t get is the angry soap box lectures from the people who disagree.

The failure of people to put themselves in other people's shoes is mind-boggling sometimes. There's a reason why so many people are angry.

Do you support arbitrary and nonsensical reviews? Do you support everything described in the article? Do you support Apple saying that there is one set of standards for all developers even when this is clearly false?

You say you spend very little time discussing this point, yet you come and post 150 words about how you love the app store and how great it is (which I get) but you don't address a single claim made in the article. Rather you refer to it as an "angry soap box" and insinuate that the author might be acting in bad faith because of a failed business.

The author is upset because Apple failed to properly enforce the rules, and this egregious error cost the author the ability to ship an iOS app. Please respond to this rather than just say, "I love Apple".

If other app stores or modes of installation exist, that ruins nothing for you. You can just ignore them and go on as you do now.

For you? It's a prison. Apple is glad you like it.

To put it bluntly: you might like your nanny filter but other people might have different preferences.

All my subs on one screen with a single click to cancel at any time, without forgoing my pre-paid time.

I wish everything were like that.

Have you ever considered that you are the one that’s wrong and emotional about it? No one wants to take the App Store away. In fact, I can think of many things the App Store could do to improve my experience. Maybe some competition would be the necessary motivation.

Because this is impossible, so how the fck would you judge the grapes you can't taste.

Because you cannot install anything on your iOS/iPadOS device from anywhere else.

I absolutely hate App Store and their stupid policies, I hate that I have an iPad Pro on which I cannot install everything I want because of their idiotic policies, on a device I paid more than 1000 EUR.

I cannot wait till EU will force them to allow competing app stores on iOS/iPadOS

I read this as: I am currently a happy apple customer. I do not buy apps on other app stores because they do not exist.

>>What I don’t get is the angry soap box lectures from the people who disagree. The intense planning on their part to mess up a thing I love just because they couldn’t make their money… Oh. Nevermind.

Apple's practices as a company are things that, historically, have more or less gotten other companies into a lot of legal trouble. The whole world is watching and waiting for a legal system somewhere to step in and say, "Ok, enough is enough."

Also - like the post says - the app is in Swedish with a Swedish dictionary. Wordle is unplayable for anyone who doesn't speak English.

Point taken about the wording though, I've updated the blog post to say: "I figured I could make a Swedish Wordle-style game myself"

It's also irrelevant when evaluating whether OP's app is also a clone. If 100 cars on the highway are speeding and I happen to be the one that gets pulled over, the judge isn't going to care that the cop didn't pull over the other 99 drivers.

Cry me a river!

Did you not read the article? It's in Swedish, so not actually a straight copy. That right there should be more than enough to allow it, as presumably there are plenty of Swedes who would like to play the game in their native language.

Obviously Apple isn’t 100% successful given the screenshot of other clones allowed in, but I hope they improve — not weaken — that process of weeding them out.

I think it's almost a given that you cannot charge for your app. A neighbor's adult daughter down the street told me (and this was perhaps eight years ago), "No one wants to even pay 99 cents for an app."

In-App purchase? Do people do that? Isn't that a little distasteful?

I just don't see a way to monetize your effort. And if you're going to essentially give it away, just make it web-based (like everyone's beloved Wordle).

The App-Store is, in this context, merely a Content Filter. So why not allow multiple content filters?

This is where you're wrong about Apple. To Apple, it's Apple that makes the platform attractive. Developers are a dime a dozen to them. Especially indie / small scale devs.

If Apple cites copycat as a rejection, there's already likely 50 other apps just like it and the pattern of app is finally being rejected. There's still opportunity, but you need to be an 'early copycat' to make it so.

On the question of whether Apple should be more like Google, the answer has again and again, from Apple, from pundits, from financial analysis been 'oh hell no'.

You are free not to use Apple. The fact that people keep talking about how they aren't using apple isn't the freedom flag waving you think it is. If you all have to keep bringing it up then it's living rent-free in your head. I don't know if it's jealousy, or wanting to have your cake and eat it to, or what else is going on. I don't use Facebook, but you don't hear me talking about it all the time (talking about having to deal with Facebook users is another matter).

In retail 'customers' who don't buy anything aren't customers. They are 'loitering' and many companies have a policy for encouraging people who are not actually shopping to leave. Traffic that does not result in revenue is overhead at best, opportunity cost at worst. A certain amount of overhead has always been tolerated as goodwill or advertising, but in any arena of life there is always someone who tries to take advantage of goodwill efforts.

Customers who don't use apps at all are fine. They aren't costing us anything. Customers that buy lots of apps are great. Customers who just want free stuff all the time are bad news. Especially because they become more expensive when the free stuff ends up causing them problems, which they feel entitled to complain about. Tech support calls are more expensive than most of us realize.

> In this case that would mean either allowing Wörd on the store, or purging all apps that resemble other apps from App Store. Starting with their own Apple Music and Translate apps

Here's the equivalence of copycat status of Wörd and of Music / Translate is implied, which is very questionable indeed.

Also, "you think that Apple should be allowed to be the only gatekeeper to 60% of people’s mobile devices" hides other logical fallacies. First, it is implied by the wording that Apple somehow became the gatekeeper of 60% of devices, whereas customers chose to buy the devices where Apple is gatekeeper, and at least some of them did it because of the fact. Second, the number 60% does not correspond to market reality. Apple is the gatekeeper of all their devices, in all countries, and worldwide share is obviously lower.

The design decisions appear to me to be more about what makes sense on a phone with a limited screen size than a deliberate copying. The Translate app comparison feels particularly forced.

For all we know, Apple believes this too and is attempting to make this reality. It's not as simple to do when there are probably hundreds of these clones flooding the store and the review process within the span of a few days.

There's a lot of tradeoffs given up when writing a webapp over a native app. It's not just "it's accessed through the browser"

A customer paid us to white label it for their private internal use. The only difference between it and our existing app was the logo and color scheme. It was rejected for nonsensical reasons a couple times and then approved after several weeks. When we did the same for another customer, that app was rejected for different reasons and we were never able to overcome those objections. It was incredibly frustrating and cost our small company a ton of money.

Even if OP is first and only (very unlikely), this isn't what racist means btw...

I’m not a fan of Apple’s puritanism, but I really don’t think people are missing out in the way you do.

You don't need access to native APIs for the game anyway.

As someone who's been dabbling in native development after over a decade of JavaScript/Ruby/Python/PHP, the iOS development toolchain does seem quite nice even though I don't own an iPhone. If Apple quit with the highway robbery and took the unfairness of their system seriously, I might actually want to buy an iPhone and work on building iOS apps.

But with Apple taking a massive cut of revenue and having this inconsistent and headachey review process, why would I do that? Life is too short. For many, that's still their thing, but there are easier ways to write code and get it out there. iPhones aren't the end all and be all of app development.