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I thought Apple disallowed apps from downloading things that were executable. A team I was on got rejected for this in 2015 or so. We were using Ionic to make a

I thought Apple disallowed apps from downloading things that were executable. A team I was on got rejected for this in 2015 or so. We were using Ionic to make a WebView based app for a news station. We wanted some of the css and js to be loaded from the internet so we could change various things without needing an official app update. We were told to we could fetch news story data from an api, and get back json/xml/etc, but not JS and CSS files.

em-bee 3y ago
i don't know what you did, but see this discussion here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23247809/does-apple-reject-hybrid-app-if-it-loads-resources-including-javascript-from-rem https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23247809/does-apple-reje... though it's not really clear to me what it means to change your app's functionality in a way that would not be appropriate for an App Store product
joshstrange 3y ago
I know of multiple apps that have that ability and I've personally shipped 10+ cross-platform apps built on Quasar+Vue+Capacitor and Ionic+Angular+Cordova/Capacitor and a few have had the ability to remotely update the code (just the JS/HTML/CSS) and they have all been approved. I am interested in the exact way the rejection was worded. IIRC their dev agreement had an exception, at one point, to the "no downloading executable code" rule, it said that using downloaded code in JavascriptCore was allowed. Apple doesn't seem to approve of remote updating but they seem to turn a blind eye to it, I would assume most big companies that use these cross-platform tools like this have a way to remotely update the code (JS/HTML/CSS). I totally believe they rejected your app though, App Store review is pretty bad. I mean at least they are _way_ faster now but it's reviewer roulette for sure. I've been dinged for things that aren't even in the App Store dev agreement, they were in some other document. Even worse the reviewer told me I needed to change my wording when requesting a permission, the problem? She wanted me to change text I don't control in the permissions dialog. I explained that I only had control over the single string in quotes but she told me I was wrong (I got through on the next review). The inconsistency in the review process is maddening and so much of it is reading the tea leaves of what they actually want and what is allowed. I mean, we all know it's against the rules to send advertising/marketing push notifications right? Right? That _never_ happens in the App Store... Make whatever rules you want but dear god please enforce them consistently and change/remove a rule if you've decided to not enforce it.
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  It's been a while but I think it was because it was considered a remote update mechanism. We planned to keep it limited to small layout fixes and such but in theory we could have changed everything about the app (it had news available in like 15 languages and there was always some new issue related to right-to-left, or CJK font stuff or etc. We didn't want to make all users have a new update just because Cyrillic needed some layout change or something). But yeah it also probably was partly due to reviewer roulette. I've experienced the same on other apps, things that have been in the app for a year can suddenly get it rejected without a corresponding rules change from Apple. Just different interpretations of our code by a new reviewer. In this case we decided to just remove that feature and re-publish.
  - joshstrange 3y ago
    > But yeah it also probably was partly due to reviewer roulette. I've experienced the same on other apps, things that have been in the app for a year can suddenly get it rejected without a corresponding rules change from Apple. Just different interpretations of our code by a new reviewer. Been there. The best is when I have an app that has actually been released on multiple other accounts (white label app) and then a reviewer wants to say it's all wrong and reject it. I the worst thing that's happened to me is when they dinged me for a soft permission prompt (asking the user before throwing the one-time-only system dialog), I removed it since I needed to get the update out (it wasn't related to this at all of course), then they started nit-picking and not only were they wrong in a lot of the cases but they were making me do like 1-2 word changes to permission prompts to make them more specific. I had no clue how many new things they'd come up with for each submission, we went back and forth a few times before it finally got through, I just bumped the build number and resubmitted.

em-bee 3y ago

i don't know what you did, but see this discussion here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23247809/does-apple-reject-hybrid-app-if-it-loads-resources-including-javascript-from-rem https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23247809/does-apple-reje... though it's not really clear to me what it means to change your app's functionality in a way that would not be appropriate for an App Store product

joshstrange 3y ago

I know of multiple apps that have that ability and I've personally shipped 10+ cross-platform apps built on Quasar+Vue+Capacitor and Ionic+Angular+Cordova/Capacitor and a few have had the ability to remotely update the code (just the JS/HTML/CSS) and they have all been approved. I am interested in the exact way the rejection was worded. IIRC their dev agreement had an exception, at one point, to the "no downloading executable code" rule, it said that using downloaded code in JavascriptCore was allowed. Apple doesn't seem to approve of remote updating but they seem to turn a blind eye to it, I would assume most big companies that use these cross-platform tools like this have a way to remotely update the code (JS/HTML/CSS). I totally believe they rejected your app though, App Store review is pretty bad. I mean at least they are _way_ faster now but it's reviewer roulette for sure. I've been dinged for things that aren't even in the App Store dev agreement, they were in some other document. Even worse the reviewer told me I needed to change my wording when requesting a permission, the problem? She wanted me to change text I don't control in the permissions dialog. I explained that I only had control over the single string in quotes but she told me I was wrong (I got through on the next review). The inconsistency in the review process is maddening and so much of it is reading the tea leaves of what they actually want and what is allowed. I mean, we all know it's against the rules to send advertising/marketing push notifications right? Right? That _never_ happens in the App Store... Make whatever rules you want but dear god please enforce them consistently and change/remove a rule if you've decided to not enforce it.

squeaky-clean 3y ago
It's been a while but I think it was because it was considered a remote update mechanism. We planned to keep it limited to small layout fixes and such but in theory we could have changed everything about the app (it had news available in like 15 languages and there was always some new issue related to right-to-left, or CJK font stuff or etc. We didn't want to make all users have a new update just because Cyrillic needed some layout change or something). But yeah it also probably was partly due to reviewer roulette. I've experienced the same on other apps, things that have been in the app for a year can suddenly get it rejected without a corresponding rules change from Apple. Just different interpretations of our code by a new reviewer. In this case we decided to just remove that feature and re-publish.
- joshstrange 3y ago
  > But yeah it also probably was partly due to reviewer roulette. I've experienced the same on other apps, things that have been in the app for a year can suddenly get it rejected without a corresponding rules change from Apple. Just different interpretations of our code by a new reviewer. Been there. The best is when I have an app that has actually been released on multiple other accounts (white label app) and then a reviewer wants to say it's all wrong and reject it. I the worst thing that's happened to me is when they dinged me for a soft permission prompt (asking the user before throwing the one-time-only system dialog), I removed it since I needed to get the update out (it wasn't related to this at all of course), then they started nit-picking and not only were they wrong in a lot of the cases but they were making me do like 1-2 word changes to permission prompts to make them more specific. I had no clue how many new things they'd come up with for each submission, we went back and forth a few times before it finally got through, I just bumped the build number and resubmitted.