14 ms·

A Tumblr developer on the App Store approval process

194 points by AndrewDucker 5y ago

ydnaclementine 5y ago
If rejecting apps that can lead to adult content (but not necessarily the main focus) seems to be the norm, how do reddit apps get around it?
- neltnerb 5y ago
  The article also mentioned twitter and instagram. All the apps that let you look at user generated content.
  - mintplant 5y ago
    Instagram forbids NSFW content platform-wide.
    - cosmotic 5y ago
      Twitter doesn't.
      - feupan 5y ago
        Can Apple ban Twitter without serious backlash?
        DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
        They could have done what Apple did with Telegram and only allow the iOS app to access SFW groups (or at least not known NSFW groups), while Android users have all the fun.
        cosmotic 5y ago
        They banned Epic Games store, which seems similarly high profile.
    - neltnerb 5y ago
      So does Tumblr, the way the article put it was that any site with user generated content would inevitably have awful things posted that get missed and might get randomly discovered by the randomly assigned reviewer's search and judge by the random reviewer's standards loosely based on some hidden guideline. I don't know about these statistics, but Tumblr is definitely NSFW-only, that was the whole deal back in 2018 that got everyone angry at them. There were some other minor differences about defaults suggested in the article as well, it didn't seem especially conspiratorial. Of course, tolerating twitter due to its size and ability to single handedly generate PR doesn't seem that conspiratorial to me. I'd be kind of surprised if that wasn't a big factor in double and quadruple checking the results before taking action instead of the reverse.
    - heavyset_go 5y ago
      Literal brothels run Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts and the content definitely isn't safe for work.
- numpad0 5y ago
  New accounts created on iOS is disallowed NSFW content and it has to be explicitly enabled from browsers
  - noahtallen 5y ago
    Just double checked — it seems there is a “allow NSFW” content switch in the iOS system settings. Reddit on iOS gives you a link into the system settings app when you search for NSFW content. But it does appear to be disabled by default in anonymous browsing mode anyways.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  The article has some speculation about this. A combination of Apple not wanting to ban larger apps like that, and larger companies having more staff to resubmit the app a thousand times to get through the thousand arbitrary rejections.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    IIRC the most popular Reddit app on iOS is Apollo, which is just a solo developer.
    - willio58 5y ago
      I doubt this, Reddit has had their own app for years now and every Reddit mobile page on the web nags you to download it
      - vorpalhex 5y ago
        The official reddit app is garbage. Apollo is a genuinely good app and people recommend it heavily on reddit itself. Spamming users is not always a good tactic.
      - jetsetgo 5y ago
wmaca 5y ago
so true. we submitted an app that had “Sign In With Apple” in a localized version. One reviewer rejected saying it should be “Continuar com a Apple”, we submitted and, on a later review, reviewer rejected saying it should be “Conectar com Apple” which it already was the first time. That is extremely frustrating and arbitrary.
- echelon 5y ago
  Document and publish your experiences. It'll help countries in their fight against the App Store monopoly. (Monopoly in the sense that 50+% of users in any given country are using a platform that only allows Apple approved and taxed instructions to run. Dating, entertainment, finance, etc. are Apple serfs.)
  - zepto 5y ago
    All those things can be done via the browser.
- Keirmot 5y ago
  Well, the Sign in/Sign up with apple button automatically does the localisation. My guess is that you designed your own button and used your own localisation for Portuguese. On the first instance you found a Portuguese reviewer, and on the second a Brazilian.
saagarjha 5y ago
> In the case of Tumblr, this would be a reviewer going to search, typing in something like 'tits’ and finding porn. Just want to emphasize this part. App Store Reviewers are completely asinine. Like, dumb as a rock. It’d almost be funny if their stupidity didn’t block your app approval. To be explicitly clear: if your app contains UGC, they will explicitly go and search for things to ding you on, and then fault you when you find it. They will go to the search bar and type in “milf” or “butts” (I wish I were joking). They’ll try to search for drugs on your marketplace. If your app runs scripts, they’ll try downloading something and then yell at you for letting them do it. The review messages they leave you bend over backwards to try to fault you for what they do in the app…things like “during review, your app downloaded code” (the reviewer went out of their way to find a way to load a script from the internet) or “your app presents adult content” (the reviewer created an account and immediately searched for “sex”). These are the people who misspell their demo account passwords and will claim the app is broken, so these idiots are almost proud when they find these, almost like they’re finding a gotcha. Of course, these rejections are all bogus. In a good system they wouldn’t happen, or if they did you’d dismiss them summarily. Instead, you need to plead and escalate until you find a person who’s not a complete bozo. Sometimes, in desperation, you come up with random filters in the hopes that they’ll just leave you alone this time. Careful, though: if you give up too much ground you won’t have any to give next time. The entire process is just designed to wear you down, to create apps that conform to a pretty image where people post about their dogs and food rather than anything that could possibly be objectionable. Platforms rightfully try to keep their own standards on their content, but many slowly give up and slide into what’s easy to defend. Apple is only behind payment processors and advertisers in forcing platforms to prude up :(
- AnonHP 5y ago
  This reminds me of security guards at various places, such as malls or parks. They take great pleasure in “enforcement” and in inconveniencing people beyond the limits of common sense. Their work happens to be the place where they can exert control while other areas of their lives may not be so great. I wonder if the App Store review recruitment process somehow (inadvertently?) selects for such people who “take it out” on the app developers because the other areas of their lives are terrible. These stories are all about exerting control, and bring no value whatsoever for Apple. For these and other reasons, I hope Apple is forced to allow side loading of apps. Apple hasn’t spent a lot of effort on the App Store (despite PR claims to the contrary). Seriously, the person at the top in charge of the App Store has been sleeping on the wheel for a long time.
vmception 5y ago
> a little part of me also wants to be cynical and say that since Instagram and Twitter are so big, they can get away with more than Tumblr can. Didnt this get leaked? Maybe that was about Facebook/Meta’s exemption of celebrity accounts And I also might be confusing this for abuse of Apple’s enterprise signing key Either way, small club and Tumblr aint in it
lwansbrough 5y ago
Last week we published a news article advertising a holiday deal for our premium subscription. Of course, our app shows our news articles. So the following day, while we were submitting a bug fix release, a reviewer rejected the app on the grounds that it advertised a premium service that was not available via Apple’s IAP subscriptions. We later found out they were talking about the news article preview tile. Their demand was that we remove all outbound links to the domain that hosts the premium content unless we implement Apple’s subscriptions. This would have included news articles, guides, account sign in and settings and other core components of the app that just happened to link to the site. So we did the only thing we could do. The entire engineering team committed the rest of the week (including the weekend) to complying with Apple’s demand and we integrated Apple payments into our backend and app. Of course this blocked us from deploying critical bug fixes but we had no other option.
- AnonHP 5y ago
  The other side of this coin are apps that blatantly show banners on opening them to go to their website and purchase a subscription for cheaper. I reported one such app a few times to Apple (using the new report an issue feature on the App Store). It’s probably been at least a couple of months, and that app still continues to do the same. It’s very clear that the rules are arbitrary and are not enforced uniformly. Apple doesn’t even seem to have an inclination to solve issues when they’re pointed out.
  - notsureaboutpg 5y ago
  - aero-glide2 5y ago
    Why would you report such a thing? Cut out the middleman.
  - skeletal88 5y ago
    Why are you supporting apple and the 30% cut they take? Why do you as a user want apple to continue this? We are developing a system for our client where their users have to buy a one time token to use it. The tokens are bought from the client's web shop. The iphone and android apps are webviews that contain the website. This was the only sane way to develop the apps because otherwise we would have to constantly deal with the idiotic review process. For example - we had added google sign in but zpple refused our review until we also added apple sign in. A feature that I haven't heard anyone of the customers actually use. Or we had a button going to the webshop. Had to remove this one because apple wanted a 30% cut. If apple got 30% of every token bought then our client wouldn't be in the business at all.
mrVentures 5y ago
We were banned for encouraging users to fight terrorism https://www.appunwrapper.com/2019/07/03/apple-rejects-nsa-intern/ https://www.appunwrapper.com/2019/07/03/apple-rejects-nsa-in...
aylmao 5y ago
I agree that it seems unfair that Tumblr has to deal with this while Twitter for example does not. Nonetheless, IMO it's not without reason. At least as of not long ago, it was much easier to accidentally bump into or see recommendations for adult content in Tumblr than in other social media. There's plenty of memes about "girls" being a banned term now, but Tumblr was notoriously full of CSAM. I don't know if and how much Tumblr has improved in these fronts recently, but say what you will about Reddit, Twitter, etc. if you don't look for sexual material, you won't have it on your feed. They're also very good at keeping illicit material out of the platform. I really hope Tumblr gets better at moderation. Outright banning a bunch of terms like this sounds like a desperate attempt at just getting rid of porn after years of not being able to control it, but far from an actual moderation strategy.
djrockstar1 5y ago
It's appalling to me that iOS developers still exist after all the hoops you have to jump through to get an iOS app out. I'm a web developer that got roped into developing and then publishing a react native app for android and iOS. The android process was relatively painless compared to the crap Apple has you do. For starters, you can't even produce an app build without running on iOS, so the company had to procure an old Mac just so we could compile. Once I got Xcode set up, I learn that I need to connect to an iPhone as a target device in order to build. Thank god for small companies and being able to get things done quick. Another hoop and painful 30-40 minute compile times later (for a relatively small app mind you, also caching didn't seem to help whatsoever cause even back to back compiles were still slow as hell), we finally get out a build out on TestFlight, only to wait an undisclosed amount of time for Apple's approval. I realize these aren't issues if you're already drunk on the Apple Kool-aid and have the latest Mac with the latest iPhone. Then these barely seem like hurdles, but to someone who hasn't already sold their soul to Apple, publishing an iOS app should not be this difficult.
- phreack 5y ago
  The reason is of course money. The profit per user on the Apple garden is light years beyond any other platform. I've seen the exact same app make 100 times as much money on iOS than on Android with half as many users.
- snyp 5y ago
  Building reactnative apps is time consuming because of the library and it’s dependencies. Native compile times are much faster.
  - tomduncalf 5y ago
    Can confirm this is true, however you should find that subsequent compiles are much quicker unless you’re doing something unusual. If you’re just changing JavaScript it should be more or less instant (you may not even need to recompile, hit R in the packager console or use hot reloading). If you add a new native dependency or change some native code, it will have to recompile any affected parts of the code but you should still see much quicker compile times than from a clean state.
throwaway984393 5y ago
A good percentage of resolving App Store problems for big companies is somebody at the submitting company calling up somebody they know at Apple high enough on the food chain who will unblock things personally. That and the business implications of a public complaint ("will Apple retaliate against us?") are why you see blog posts from individuals about App Store problems and not from big companies. You would think if you make Apple several million dollars that they'd give you a dedicated account rep or something (like AWS, or nearly any other large managed service company does). Newp. $1 or a million dollars, you're all the same to The Big A.
suction 5y ago
Does Tumblr have to be an app for any non-marketing reason? If your website allows upload of porn, let it live in on the free internet as long as we still have it and don't waste resources on making it an "app". Problem solved. If that eats into your returns in a significant way, you don't have a viable business model.
- travisd 5y ago
  > If that eats into your returns in a significant way, you don't have a viable business model A viable business model is one where, by definition, consumers will purchase your thing at levels that are sustainable. People use apps more than they use web browsers for the most part. Tumblr has to build what people want.
  - suction 5y ago
    ...or what people think they want...
vulvahalla 5y ago
I made a satire game about Trump a few years ago. It got banned so many times from the AppStore and I had to write in long messages explaining how they are imposing their wrong interpretations onto my work and it took several weeks of messaging back and forth with them until they understood. They forced me to remove content from the app that I saw on Twitter using the iOS Twitter app. They did not force Twitter to remove the content. They banned my game for being pornographic because one of the mini games was called ‘Make Ivanka come’ but in the game you just had to call Ivanka to the president’s desk to get professional advice. The purpose of this obviously being satire to remind people how screwed up things are. Banning satire is like 1984, but banning porn also is in my opinion. At the same time the BBC runs reports about kids using Instagram to sell drugs which can cause actual harm. How can this be?
artpi 5y ago
Another Tumblr dev here: That's not even going into the monetization pieces. As we are implementing tipping and multi-merchant subscriptions in Post+, we still have to use In-App-Purchases with it's severely lacking API. The hoops we have to go through to get money from our App Store account to merchants are insane. We are using Stripe Connect infrastructure and Payouts API to do that, and that would be totally fine, as well as taking the fee hit. The most insane thing is that the subscriber can be in a number of countries, where Apple fees differ (as they contain tax). But the webhook does not contain this information, so we had to reverse engineer the whole Apple pricing matrix and the fee calculation for each subscriber to know what portion to forward onto the Stripe account, and so on and so on. It's been a ride.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  Why do you deal with the app store and don't focus on web-only
  - artpi 5y ago
    Many, many users expect every single thing to be an app
    - cblconfederate 5y ago
      But you're incentivizing that behavior. How does that help (and tumblr is a blog, it s more usable as a website than as a website-in-an-app
      - artpi 5y ago
        Our main business is not fighting Apple, although we support the open web quite a bit by leading the WordPress project https://www.protocol.com/matt-mullenweg https://www.protocol.com/matt-mullenweg
        cblconfederate 5y ago
idrisser 5y ago
Someone should really focus on building a trusted jailbreak solution so we (and not apple or google) can decide what we install on our $1,000 phones. Anyone knows a project working on this?
- IiydAbITMvJkqKf 5y ago
  android + alternative store (f-droid or something else)
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  If you start distributing a jailbreak, Apple will patch it. If you sell it to an organization that buys exploits, you can enjoy your exploit indefinitely and make a nice chunk of change on top of it. Apple benefits from this dynamic greatly, as their App Store revenue is more important to them than their uses' security. They incentivize hoarding potential jailbreak exploits and selling them to the highest, and most likely malicious and deadly, bidders, instead of sharing them with users to increase their freedoms.
ankit219 5y ago
Anywhere there are humans involved, there are bound to be multiple interpretations of the same words. This becomes a problem when you put humans in positions where if they do their job well, there is no upside, but screwing up has a large downside. Most Apple Reviewers work keeping that in mind. Some are strict, others are not, and the chances are when you are matched with a random reviewer, your app would always be reviewed differently. This has downsides, but this reduces bias and malice (and keeps just incompetency in the process) and this is a better system than one where you are stuck with one reviewer throughout. (imagine being assigned the most anal reviewer possible) Regarding the 30% cut and the review process, of course it does not make me happy as a developer. As a user though, I can give an iphone to my parents knowing full well that they would not be scammed or be enticed into downloading really shady apps. This has happened on android where they would just give away every permission, and had lock screen controlled by a totally useless app. I would not risk giving them free access to android again, no matter how much time it takes for them to get used to iPhone. Review process is important in that regard, and if a bunch of devs like me need to pay to fund that, I am happy with that given what it results in on the consumer side. The 30% tax needs to be for infinitely reproducible digital goods - like items in fortnite where a new purchase in db entry - vs scare digital goods like an one time only online session by someone. The other alternative means it's contingent on me as a dev to build trust to get payments and this is where I would always lose out to big brands anyway. Wish there was a better way, but have no suggestions as to how.
go_prodev 5y ago
It appears that the apple tax and review process is a constant problem for iOS developers (according to many linked articles on HN) If it genuinely is a big problem, why don't the apps band together and advertise the problem to their users? I'm guessing many users don't know/care right now, but might pay attention if the app they love suddenly pulls the plug on iOS. Edit: like a union
- smoldesu 5y ago
  They are advertising it, that's what this is. They're just not in a position to bargain though; Apple has proven time-after-time that they won't make changes to their policy unless faced with significant legal backlash. If you're a big developer, pulling iOS support would threaten your userbase and create a vacuum for lookalikes to take over your place, which is especially bad considering how Apple has no policy for curating "clone" apps. If you're a small developer, you're basically shooting yourself in the foot by not offering cross-platform support of your content, and losing out on a chunk of the revenue that you need to continue development. It's a catch-22, and a fairly well-engineered one at that. Apple won't care about this unless legislators do. They defended their 30% cut as a necessary and inexorable part of the App Store experience until the Epic case, where they announced that actually they can make do with 15%, and maintain the same level of quality. I think we're forgetting how much of a bargaining chip Epic had, too; Fortnite, at it's apex, could not convince Apple to bend their rules regarding app distribution. The only solution here is sideloading, the only question is how long it's going to take before the government lays down the law.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > If it genuinely is a big problem, why don't the apps band together and advertise the problem to their users? Apple abuses their market position in order to leverage a chilling effect on talking about their abuses at all. From[1]: > If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps. [1] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
axiosgunnar 5y ago
Interesting article, basically it boils down to "if your business model requires you to have an App in an App Store, your decades worth of work are at the whim of Big Tech". Same with Google banning accounts etc. Divesting from Big Tech is the only solution. Don't write Apps, don't use AWS, etc.
cumshitpiss 5y ago
akudha 5y ago
The old man in me thinks why bother participating in the App Store shenanigans at all in the first place? Why take all the stress? Just make something for the open web and enjoy life. But, if no one speaks up, then the situation is going to only get worse. We don’t have a choice today, as Android ecosystem is worse than iOS. So here we are, almost 2022, still fighting extremely arrogant companies and walled gardens. I really wish projects like pinephone etc take off.
- kevincox 5y ago
  Personally I don't and just release web apps. But if I was a for-profit company you can likely attract more customers by releasing an iOS app. Unfortunately the costs of complying with their policies are lower than the profit available. On the other hand I don't see why users are happy to let Apple dictate which apps they are allowed to install. But as long as users are satisfied with that I understand why companies put up with it.
tommek4077 5y ago
Maybe we shouldn't create an app for every website?
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Maybe Apple should improve PWA support so that could be a reality instead of a pipe dream.
  - tommek4077 5y ago
    Because you need a pwa for a blog website?!
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      Yeah, if you want to get notifications when people interact with your site.
      - tommek4077 5y ago
        Because there is no such thing like mail?
        smoldesu 5y ago
        Mail =/= notifications.
protomyth 5y ago
The App Store should have a blanket exception for any app that shows user content. The hypocrisy of shipping Safari, Mail, and every Stream Movie App is astounding. I do not want a company with fake morality determining what my morals should be. At this point we need a new set of laws to govern the openness of app stores.
makecheck 5y ago
Back when they had a developer survey, one of my feedbacks was essentially to get rid of App Review completely: not to try to fix it or reduce it but to literally shut the entire thing down. It really is that useless.
SergeAx 5y ago
> In the case of Tumblr, this would be a reviewer going to search, typing in something like 'tits’ and finding porn. I just don't get it. With the current state of image processing ML hacking together an NSFW detecting horizontally scalable service is a question of days. Then you just have to mark all your NSFW content by a flag in a database and stop showing it to iOS devices. That will make people think a bit next time when they choose a new mobile phone.
jarek83 5y ago
How come any internet browser can get past the 'porn' policy since all of them will show porn when you type 'porn'?
- LexGray 5y ago
  All the default engines are set to “moderate” by default. “Porn” does not show anything immediately explicit. A tiny hurdle, but still a hurdle and that is enough for many people to rethink. Tumbler you could by default get horrific images in search results.

194 points by AndrewDucker 5y ago

If rejecting apps that can lead to adult content (but not necessarily the main focus) seems to be the norm, how do reddit apps get around it?

neltnerb 5y ago
The article also mentioned twitter and instagram. All the apps that let you look at user generated content.
- mintplant 5y ago
  Instagram forbids NSFW content platform-wide.
  - cosmotic 5y ago
    Twitter doesn't.
    - feupan 5y ago
      Can Apple ban Twitter without serious backlash?
      - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
        They could have done what Apple did with Telegram and only allow the iOS app to access SFW groups (or at least not known NSFW groups), while Android users have all the fun.
      - cosmotic 5y ago
        They banned Epic Games store, which seems similarly high profile.
  - neltnerb 5y ago
    So does Tumblr, the way the article put it was that any site with user generated content would inevitably have awful things posted that get missed and might get randomly discovered by the randomly assigned reviewer's search and judge by the random reviewer's standards loosely based on some hidden guideline. I don't know about these statistics, but Tumblr is definitely NSFW-only, that was the whole deal back in 2018 that got everyone angry at them. There were some other minor differences about defaults suggested in the article as well, it didn't seem especially conspiratorial. Of course, tolerating twitter due to its size and ability to single handedly generate PR doesn't seem that conspiratorial to me. I'd be kind of surprised if that wasn't a big factor in double and quadruple checking the results before taking action instead of the reverse.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    Literal brothels run Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts and the content definitely isn't safe for work.
numpad0 5y ago
New accounts created on iOS is disallowed NSFW content and it has to be explicitly enabled from browsers
- noahtallen 5y ago
  Just double checked — it seems there is a “allow NSFW” content switch in the iOS system settings. Reddit on iOS gives you a link into the system settings app when you search for NSFW content. But it does appear to be disabled by default in anonymous browsing mode anyways.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
The article has some speculation about this. A combination of Apple not wanting to ban larger apps like that, and larger companies having more staff to resubmit the app a thousand times to get through the thousand arbitrary rejections.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  IIRC the most popular Reddit app on iOS is Apollo, which is just a solo developer.
  - willio58 5y ago
    I doubt this, Reddit has had their own app for years now and every Reddit mobile page on the web nags you to download it
    - vorpalhex 5y ago
      The official reddit app is garbage. Apollo is a genuinely good app and people recommend it heavily on reddit itself. Spamming users is not always a good tactic.
    - jetsetgo 5y ago

wmaca 5y ago

so true. we submitted an app that had “Sign In With Apple” in a localized version. One reviewer rejected saying it should be “Continuar com a Apple”, we submitted and, on a later review, reviewer rejected saying it should be “Conectar com Apple” which it already was the first time. That is extremely frustrating and arbitrary.

echelon 5y ago
Document and publish your experiences. It'll help countries in their fight against the App Store monopoly. (Monopoly in the sense that 50+% of users in any given country are using a platform that only allows Apple approved and taxed instructions to run. Dating, entertainment, finance, etc. are Apple serfs.)
- zepto 5y ago
  All those things can be done via the browser.
Keirmot 5y ago
Well, the Sign in/Sign up with apple button automatically does the localisation. My guess is that you designed your own button and used your own localisation for Portuguese. On the first instance you found a Portuguese reviewer, and on the second a Brazilian.

saagarjha 5y ago

> In the case of Tumblr, this would be a reviewer going to search, typing in something like 'tits’ and finding porn. Just want to emphasize this part. App Store Reviewers are completely asinine. Like, dumb as a rock. It’d almost be funny if their stupidity didn’t block your app approval. To be explicitly clear: if your app contains UGC, they will explicitly go and search for things to ding you on, and then fault you when you find it. They will go to the search bar and type in “milf” or “butts” (I wish I were joking). They’ll try to search for drugs on your marketplace. If your app runs scripts, they’ll try downloading something and then yell at you for letting them do it. The review messages they leave you bend over backwards to try to fault you for what they do in the app…things like “during review, your app downloaded code” (the reviewer went out of their way to find a way to load a script from the internet) or “your app presents adult content” (the reviewer created an account and immediately searched for “sex”). These are the people who misspell their demo account passwords and will claim the app is broken, so these idiots are almost proud when they find these, almost like they’re finding a gotcha. Of course, these rejections are all bogus. In a good system they wouldn’t happen, or if they did you’d dismiss them summarily. Instead, you need to plead and escalate until you find a person who’s not a complete bozo. Sometimes, in desperation, you come up with random filters in the hopes that they’ll just leave you alone this time. Careful, though: if you give up too much ground you won’t have any to give next time. The entire process is just designed to wear you down, to create apps that conform to a pretty image where people post about their dogs and food rather than anything that could possibly be objectionable. Platforms rightfully try to keep their own standards on their content, but many slowly give up and slide into what’s easy to defend. Apple is only behind payment processors and advertisers in forcing platforms to prude up :(

AnonHP 5y ago
This reminds me of security guards at various places, such as malls or parks. They take great pleasure in “enforcement” and in inconveniencing people beyond the limits of common sense. Their work happens to be the place where they can exert control while other areas of their lives may not be so great. I wonder if the App Store review recruitment process somehow (inadvertently?) selects for such people who “take it out” on the app developers because the other areas of their lives are terrible. These stories are all about exerting control, and bring no value whatsoever for Apple. For these and other reasons, I hope Apple is forced to allow side loading of apps. Apple hasn’t spent a lot of effort on the App Store (despite PR claims to the contrary). Seriously, the person at the top in charge of the App Store has been sleeping on the wheel for a long time.

vmception 5y ago

> a little part of me also wants to be cynical and say that since Instagram and Twitter are so big, they can get away with more than Tumblr can. Didnt this get leaked? Maybe that was about Facebook/Meta’s exemption of celebrity accounts And I also might be confusing this for abuse of Apple’s enterprise signing key Either way, small club and Tumblr aint in it

lwansbrough 5y ago

Last week we published a news article advertising a holiday deal for our premium subscription. Of course, our app shows our news articles. So the following day, while we were submitting a bug fix release, a reviewer rejected the app on the grounds that it advertised a premium service that was not available via Apple’s IAP subscriptions. We later found out they were talking about the news article preview tile. Their demand was that we remove all outbound links to the domain that hosts the premium content unless we implement Apple’s subscriptions. This would have included news articles, guides, account sign in and settings and other core components of the app that just happened to link to the site. So we did the only thing we could do. The entire engineering team committed the rest of the week (including the weekend) to complying with Apple’s demand and we integrated Apple payments into our backend and app. Of course this blocked us from deploying critical bug fixes but we had no other option.

AnonHP 5y ago
The other side of this coin are apps that blatantly show banners on opening them to go to their website and purchase a subscription for cheaper. I reported one such app a few times to Apple (using the new report an issue feature on the App Store). It’s probably been at least a couple of months, and that app still continues to do the same. It’s very clear that the rules are arbitrary and are not enforced uniformly. Apple doesn’t even seem to have an inclination to solve issues when they’re pointed out.
- notsureaboutpg 5y ago
- aero-glide2 5y ago
  Why would you report such a thing? Cut out the middleman.
- skeletal88 5y ago
  Why are you supporting apple and the 30% cut they take? Why do you as a user want apple to continue this? We are developing a system for our client where their users have to buy a one time token to use it. The tokens are bought from the client's web shop. The iphone and android apps are webviews that contain the website. This was the only sane way to develop the apps because otherwise we would have to constantly deal with the idiotic review process. For example - we had added google sign in but zpple refused our review until we also added apple sign in. A feature that I haven't heard anyone of the customers actually use. Or we had a button going to the webshop. Had to remove this one because apple wanted a 30% cut. If apple got 30% of every token bought then our client wouldn't be in the business at all.

mrVentures 5y ago

We were banned for encouraging users to fight terrorism https://www.appunwrapper.com/2019/07/03/apple-rejects-nsa-intern/ https://www.appunwrapper.com/2019/07/03/apple-rejects-nsa-in...

aylmao 5y ago

I agree that it seems unfair that Tumblr has to deal with this while Twitter for example does not. Nonetheless, IMO it's not without reason. At least as of not long ago, it was much easier to accidentally bump into or see recommendations for adult content in Tumblr than in other social media. There's plenty of memes about "girls" being a banned term now, but Tumblr was notoriously full of CSAM. I don't know if and how much Tumblr has improved in these fronts recently, but say what you will about Reddit, Twitter, etc. if you don't look for sexual material, you won't have it on your feed. They're also very good at keeping illicit material out of the platform. I really hope Tumblr gets better at moderation. Outright banning a bunch of terms like this sounds like a desperate attempt at just getting rid of porn after years of not being able to control it, but far from an actual moderation strategy.

djrockstar1 5y ago

It's appalling to me that iOS developers still exist after all the hoops you have to jump through to get an iOS app out. I'm a web developer that got roped into developing and then publishing a react native app for android and iOS. The android process was relatively painless compared to the crap Apple has you do. For starters, you can't even produce an app build without running on iOS, so the company had to procure an old Mac just so we could compile. Once I got Xcode set up, I learn that I need to connect to an iPhone as a target device in order to build. Thank god for small companies and being able to get things done quick. Another hoop and painful 30-40 minute compile times later (for a relatively small app mind you, also caching didn't seem to help whatsoever cause even back to back compiles were still slow as hell), we finally get out a build out on TestFlight, only to wait an undisclosed amount of time for Apple's approval. I realize these aren't issues if you're already drunk on the Apple Kool-aid and have the latest Mac with the latest iPhone. Then these barely seem like hurdles, but to someone who hasn't already sold their soul to Apple, publishing an iOS app should not be this difficult.

phreack 5y ago
The reason is of course money. The profit per user on the Apple garden is light years beyond any other platform. I've seen the exact same app make 100 times as much money on iOS than on Android with half as many users.
snyp 5y ago
Building reactnative apps is time consuming because of the library and it’s dependencies. Native compile times are much faster.
- tomduncalf 5y ago
  Can confirm this is true, however you should find that subsequent compiles are much quicker unless you’re doing something unusual. If you’re just changing JavaScript it should be more or less instant (you may not even need to recompile, hit R in the packager console or use hot reloading). If you add a new native dependency or change some native code, it will have to recompile any affected parts of the code but you should still see much quicker compile times than from a clean state.

throwaway984393 5y ago

A good percentage of resolving App Store problems for big companies is somebody at the submitting company calling up somebody they know at Apple high enough on the food chain who will unblock things personally. That and the business implications of a public complaint ("will Apple retaliate against us?") are why you see blog posts from individuals about App Store problems and not from big companies. You would think if you make Apple several million dollars that they'd give you a dedicated account rep or something (like AWS, or nearly any other large managed service company does). Newp. $1 or a million dollars, you're all the same to The Big A.

suction 5y ago

Does Tumblr have to be an app for any non-marketing reason? If your website allows upload of porn, let it live in on the free internet as long as we still have it and don't waste resources on making it an "app". Problem solved. If that eats into your returns in a significant way, you don't have a viable business model.

travisd 5y ago
> If that eats into your returns in a significant way, you don't have a viable business model A viable business model is one where, by definition, consumers will purchase your thing at levels that are sustainable. People use apps more than they use web browsers for the most part. Tumblr has to build what people want.
- suction 5y ago
  ...or what people think they want...

vulvahalla 5y ago

I made a satire game about Trump a few years ago. It got banned so many times from the AppStore and I had to write in long messages explaining how they are imposing their wrong interpretations onto my work and it took several weeks of messaging back and forth with them until they understood. They forced me to remove content from the app that I saw on Twitter using the iOS Twitter app. They did not force Twitter to remove the content. They banned my game for being pornographic because one of the mini games was called ‘Make Ivanka come’ but in the game you just had to call Ivanka to the president’s desk to get professional advice. The purpose of this obviously being satire to remind people how screwed up things are. Banning satire is like 1984, but banning porn also is in my opinion. At the same time the BBC runs reports about kids using Instagram to sell drugs which can cause actual harm. How can this be?

artpi 5y ago

Another Tumblr dev here: That's not even going into the monetization pieces. As we are implementing tipping and multi-merchant subscriptions in Post+, we still have to use In-App-Purchases with it's severely lacking API. The hoops we have to go through to get money from our App Store account to merchants are insane. We are using Stripe Connect infrastructure and Payouts API to do that, and that would be totally fine, as well as taking the fee hit. The most insane thing is that the subscriber can be in a number of countries, where Apple fees differ (as they contain tax). But the webhook does not contain this information, so we had to reverse engineer the whole Apple pricing matrix and the fee calculation for each subscriber to know what portion to forward onto the Stripe account, and so on and so on. It's been a ride.

cblconfederate 5y ago
Why do you deal with the app store and don't focus on web-only
- artpi 5y ago
  Many, many users expect every single thing to be an app
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    But you're incentivizing that behavior. How does that help (and tumblr is a blog, it s more usable as a website than as a website-in-an-app
    - artpi 5y ago
      Our main business is not fighting Apple, although we support the open web quite a bit by leading the WordPress project https://www.protocol.com/matt-mullenweg https://www.protocol.com/matt-mullenweg
      - cblconfederate 5y ago

idrisser 5y ago

Someone should really focus on building a trusted jailbreak solution so we (and not apple or google) can decide what we install on our $1,000 phones. Anyone knows a project working on this?

IiydAbITMvJkqKf 5y ago
android + alternative store (f-droid or something else)
heavyset_go 5y ago
If you start distributing a jailbreak, Apple will patch it. If you sell it to an organization that buys exploits, you can enjoy your exploit indefinitely and make a nice chunk of change on top of it. Apple benefits from this dynamic greatly, as their App Store revenue is more important to them than their uses' security. They incentivize hoarding potential jailbreak exploits and selling them to the highest, and most likely malicious and deadly, bidders, instead of sharing them with users to increase their freedoms.

ankit219 5y ago

Anywhere there are humans involved, there are bound to be multiple interpretations of the same words. This becomes a problem when you put humans in positions where if they do their job well, there is no upside, but screwing up has a large downside. Most Apple Reviewers work keeping that in mind. Some are strict, others are not, and the chances are when you are matched with a random reviewer, your app would always be reviewed differently. This has downsides, but this reduces bias and malice (and keeps just incompetency in the process) and this is a better system than one where you are stuck with one reviewer throughout. (imagine being assigned the most anal reviewer possible) Regarding the 30% cut and the review process, of course it does not make me happy as a developer. As a user though, I can give an iphone to my parents knowing full well that they would not be scammed or be enticed into downloading really shady apps. This has happened on android where they would just give away every permission, and had lock screen controlled by a totally useless app. I would not risk giving them free access to android again, no matter how much time it takes for them to get used to iPhone. Review process is important in that regard, and if a bunch of devs like me need to pay to fund that, I am happy with that given what it results in on the consumer side. The 30% tax needs to be for infinitely reproducible digital goods - like items in fortnite where a new purchase in db entry - vs scare digital goods like an one time only online session by someone. The other alternative means it's contingent on me as a dev to build trust to get payments and this is where I would always lose out to big brands anyway. Wish there was a better way, but have no suggestions as to how.

go_prodev 5y ago

It appears that the apple tax and review process is a constant problem for iOS developers (according to many linked articles on HN) If it genuinely is a big problem, why don't the apps band together and advertise the problem to their users? I'm guessing many users don't know/care right now, but might pay attention if the app they love suddenly pulls the plug on iOS. Edit: like a union

smoldesu 5y ago
They are advertising it, that's what this is. They're just not in a position to bargain though; Apple has proven time-after-time that they won't make changes to their policy unless faced with significant legal backlash. If you're a big developer, pulling iOS support would threaten your userbase and create a vacuum for lookalikes to take over your place, which is especially bad considering how Apple has no policy for curating "clone" apps. If you're a small developer, you're basically shooting yourself in the foot by not offering cross-platform support of your content, and losing out on a chunk of the revenue that you need to continue development. It's a catch-22, and a fairly well-engineered one at that. Apple won't care about this unless legislators do. They defended their 30% cut as a necessary and inexorable part of the App Store experience until the Epic case, where they announced that actually they can make do with 15%, and maintain the same level of quality. I think we're forgetting how much of a bargaining chip Epic had, too; Fortnite, at it's apex, could not convince Apple to bend their rules regarding app distribution. The only solution here is sideloading, the only question is how long it's going to take before the government lays down the law.
heavyset_go 5y ago
> If it genuinely is a big problem, why don't the apps band together and advertise the problem to their users? Apple abuses their market position in order to leverage a chilling effect on talking about their abuses at all. From[1]: > If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps. [1] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

axiosgunnar 5y ago

Interesting article, basically it boils down to "if your business model requires you to have an App in an App Store, your decades worth of work are at the whim of Big Tech". Same with Google banning accounts etc. Divesting from Big Tech is the only solution. Don't write Apps, don't use AWS, etc.

cumshitpiss 5y ago

akudha 5y ago

The old man in me thinks why bother participating in the App Store shenanigans at all in the first place? Why take all the stress? Just make something for the open web and enjoy life. But, if no one speaks up, then the situation is going to only get worse. We don’t have a choice today, as Android ecosystem is worse than iOS. So here we are, almost 2022, still fighting extremely arrogant companies and walled gardens. I really wish projects like pinephone etc take off.

kevincox 5y ago
Personally I don't and just release web apps. But if I was a for-profit company you can likely attract more customers by releasing an iOS app. Unfortunately the costs of complying with their policies are lower than the profit available. On the other hand I don't see why users are happy to let Apple dictate which apps they are allowed to install. But as long as users are satisfied with that I understand why companies put up with it.

tommek4077 5y ago

Maybe we shouldn't create an app for every website?

smoldesu 5y ago
Maybe Apple should improve PWA support so that could be a reality instead of a pipe dream.
- tommek4077 5y ago
  Because you need a pwa for a blog website?!
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Yeah, if you want to get notifications when people interact with your site.
    - tommek4077 5y ago
      Because there is no such thing like mail?
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        Mail =/= notifications.

protomyth 5y ago

The App Store should have a blanket exception for any app that shows user content. The hypocrisy of shipping Safari, Mail, and every Stream Movie App is astounding. I do not want a company with fake morality determining what my morals should be. At this point we need a new set of laws to govern the openness of app stores.

makecheck 5y ago

Back when they had a developer survey, one of my feedbacks was essentially to get rid of App Review completely: not to try to fix it or reduce it but to literally shut the entire thing down. It really is that useless.

SergeAx 5y ago

> In the case of Tumblr, this would be a reviewer going to search, typing in something like 'tits’ and finding porn. I just don't get it. With the current state of image processing ML hacking together an NSFW detecting horizontally scalable service is a question of days. Then you just have to mark all your NSFW content by a flag in a database and stop showing it to iOS devices. That will make people think a bit next time when they choose a new mobile phone.

jarek83 5y ago

How come any internet browser can get past the 'porn' policy since all of them will show porn when you type 'porn'?

LexGray 5y ago
All the default engines are set to “moderate” by default. “Porn” does not show anything immediately explicit. A tiny hurdle, but still a hurdle and that is enough for many people to rethink. Tumbler you could by default get horrific images in search results.