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Apple Has Removed Dash from the App Store

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Re: Apple Has Removed Dash from the App Store

#381

I am annoyed by something else: today Apple stepped on the wrong toe, the community will cry foul and someone from Apple who reads HN will rush to salvage the situation. We have seen this pattern before (usually but not exclusively with Apple). But what about the thousands of small and nameless developers that were crushed by some script bug or killed by operator misclick? Who will ever help them?

Human support is supposed to help them. What I found unacceptable is "We are banning you and we won't tell you anything about it". This pattern is extremely common. And extremely frustrating. You can't put one in jail without telling why (and right to defend). In many developed countries you can't even fire a worker without a solid reason. It should be prohibited for companies to halt service someone without providin…

I am banned from being an Amazon marketplace seller. I have no idea why. They say there is no way to learn more, and it's for life. I've never even sold anything there.

My wife was banned a bit before more. She sold one textbook and fulfilled the transaction perfectly. She found out she was banned when they said they were keeping her money for 45 days, and they would be kind enough to release it to her if the buyer confirmed receipt of the book (they did, and she did get her money eventually).

Based on the mail that was arriving, we _think_ that someone who lived at our apartment before us was doing something shady. Amazon doesn't care though.

This kind of thing is why it's incredibly frustrating that people blithely let a few companies control most commerce.

Re: Apple Has Removed Dash from the App Store

#382
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a choice. Browser technology is still a long way from native performance.

So much this. There are also weird quirks to deal with when dealing with browsers vs. native. On iOS, native scrolling 'just works,' but within our app (Cordova-based) it took a bunch of hand-holding to make it a decent experience.' One example, on iOS WebKit if you flick to scroll, and then "click" (touch) on the screen while the scroll animation is still running, the click event will report a position on the webpag…

That is Apple's fault, not the web's or browsers' in general.

Re: Apple Has Removed Dash from the App Store

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>It should be prohibited for companies to halt service someone without providing a reasonable explanation. What a terrible idea.

well depending on the service you are not allowed to halt that service for various reasons - for example you can't halt or refuse to provide service in just about anything for reasons of race in countries whose legal systems I am familiar with, therefore there is some requirement to provide a reasonable explanation for refusal of service in almost any business - it just so happens that an app store type business seem…

They did provide a reason - fraudulent conduct. Are other business required to provide more detail?

Re: Apple Has Removed Dash from the App Store

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human support is supposed to help them. What I found unacceptable is "We are banning you and we won't tell you anything about it". This pattern is extremely common. And extremely frustrating. You can't put one in jail without telling why (and right to defend). In many developed countries you can't even fire a worker without a solid reason. It should be prohibited for companies to halt service someone without providin…

I am banned from being an Amazon marketplace seller. I have no idea why. They say there is no way to learn more, and it's for life. I've never even sold anything there. My wife was banned a bit before more. She sold one textbook and fulfilled the transaction perfectly. She found out she was banned when they said they were keeping her money for 45 days, and they would be kind enough to release it to her if the buyer c…

I wonder if that attitude is reflective of simply how tech companies whitelist and blacklist stuff for many things. Once, my organization's email server was considered a spammer because it had a new IP address that apparently was part of a blacklisted IP block. It took us so long to get everything sorted out and get ourselves off of all the blacklists.

Admittedly, we at least had recourse, while you don't for whatever reason, in the event that you one day do want to become a marketplace seller. My point is that it's really easy to get blacklisted. Perhaps it's because they prefer to have some false positives, rather than deal with real bad actors. Just a conjecture.

Re: Apple Has Removed Dash from the App Store

#385
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it could just mean that the person they talked to couldn't see any other information beyond what had already been communicated to the developer (terminated for fraudulent activity). Assuming this was human error on the part of Apple this would make sense, because there was no actual fraudulent activity and so no info would be available beyond the fact that someone flagged the account as such.

>Or it could just mean that the person they talked to couldn't see any other information beyond what had already been communicated to the developer Which is, in and of itself, a problem. It's understandable that the information might not be immediately on hand, but then the correct response would be to direct the caller to someone who can help. Otherwise, yes, it does come off as a big "fuck you".

Why are you assuming there's anyone who could help? Machine learning is used heavily in anti-fraud systems. Machine learning is also relatively opaque—a spam filter can't be prodded to "explain its thinking." I suspect there's frequently not a single human being in the company who could pull up the raw score vector fed to their anti-fraud model and use it to tell you what exactly made you look bad.

Re: Apple Has Removed Dash from the App Store

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well depending on the service you are not allowed to halt that service for various reasons - for example you can't halt or refuse to provide service in just about anything for reasons of race in countries whose legal systems I am familiar with, therefore there is some requirement to provide a reasonable explanation for refusal of service in almost any business - it just so happens that an app store type business seem…

They did provide a reason - fraudulent conduct. Are other business required to provide more detail?

No, I was replying specifically to the parent comment that said it was a terrible idea that a reasonable explanation be provided. Although, depending on the relevant legal system, just specifying fraudulent conduct without providing a lot more detail would be in itself problematic.

Re: Apple Has Removed Dash from the App Store

#387
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this. There are also weird quirks to deal with when dealing with browsers vs. native. On iOS, native scrolling 'just works,' but within our app (Cordova-based) it took a bunch of hand-holding to make it a decent experience.' One example, on iOS WebKit if you flick to scroll, and then "click" (touch) on the screen while the scroll animation is still running, the click event will report a position on the webpag…

That is Apple's fault, not the web's or browsers' in general.

Well, then all browser vendors are to blame, because the experience with Apple browsers is no better or worse than any other browser for serious web-based apps.

Re: Apple Has Removed Dash from the App Store

#389
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except apple is not society. It is not democracy. It's a for profit company, and can do whatever it wants. It is in no way entitled to be fair. If you don't want it to behave this way, as a consumer or developer, you just have to choose to not deal with it. But you don't want to, because it makes you money and makes you life more comfortable in some way. What it means is that you value money/confort more than been re…

Society can decide what behavior is allowed and what isn't. Just because a company is a company doesn't mean it's out of reach of judicial rules. A company can't dump chemicals in any river without oversight; it could be compelled to accept an appeals process when terminating a contract with a developer.

But what apple is doing is not currently illegal. Just highly disrespectful.

Now we can act as a society to make it illegal, but this won't happen.

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