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My App Is Dead in the Water

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Re: My App Is Dead in the Water

#11

Post by toyg »

salvar wrote: post #2

This seems weird enough to be an error of some kind. Not that Apple is likely to fix it, but enforcing this rule would exclude: - All Reddit apps - All HN apps - Twitter - Facebook - Google News - Any link or news aggregator I guess even a browser wouldn't fly, since it "displays full articles from multiple news sources."

Unless they are cracking down on apps that do nothing but republish links and feeds. Most Reddit apps will let you post and engage; some HN apps will do that too (shout out to my beloved Minihack). This particular app didn't, so it's difficult to argue that it provided anything more than republishing links... something that surely should be done only by their News app now /s

Re: My App Is Dead in the Water

#12

Post by kara-1234 »

chipgap98 wrote: post #8

There must be thousands and thousands of apps that function similar to HN clients. Providing a wrapper of an existing site and some additionally functionality seems pretty standard. This is another sad example of the power the internet giants have over developers when we're forced to build for their platforms in order to get users.

Completely agreed here, we gave these companies all the power to keep us safe, integrate into our lives, and at the drop of a hat now they can take it away from you with no real way to fight back.

Re: My App Is Dead in the Water

#14

Post by toyg »

jey wrote: post #9

> - Only show a portion of the article within your app and link out to Safari for the rest Reading between the lines here, is the problem that ad tracking works less in these apps due to having separate cookies, so publishers are pressuring Apple to remove these apps?

More likely that is about Apple pushing its News app.

Re: My App Is Dead in the Water

#15

Post by dewey »

Is the app actually parsing the articles and displaying them the app or just like other HN clients that just have links and you open them in Safari? If it's the first then I guess the complaint makes sense if you are implementing some kind of "Reader" mode in the app itself by scraping the content.

Re: My App Is Dead in the Water

#18

Post by salvar »

toyg wrote: post #11
salvar wrote: post #2

This seems weird enough to be an error of some kind. Not that Apple is likely to fix it, but enforcing this rule would exclude: - All Reddit apps - All HN apps - Twitter - Facebook - Google News - Any link or news aggregator I guess even a browser wouldn't fly, since it "displays full articles from multiple news sources."

Unless they are cracking down on apps that do nothing but republish links and feeds. Most Reddit apps will let you post and engage; some HN apps will do that too (shout out to my beloved Minihack). This particular app didn't, so it's difficult to argue that it provided anything more than republishing links... something that surely should be done only by their News app now /s

I guess... but that still leaves pretty much all news aggregators. Google News doesn't let you do much other than read news from all over the internet. It's functionally exactly the same, only with a different aggregating algorithm.

Re: My App Is Dead in the Water

#19

Post by gurpreet- »

wsc981 wrote: post #6

Painful, but I guess it's up to the individual AppStore reviewer to figure out what is ok or not. I actually created a few years ago a HackerNews client as well for iOS, but it never got through the review process, not even version 1.0. I was surprised, since many other HackerNews apps with similar features were allowed. At that point I just gave up and put the source code on Github, for whole the world to see. I bel…

Yes, it would help to know why that condition is there in the first place and also why Apple exercise it for some apps and not others.

There's little app developers can do about it for iOS. On Android you can install new app stores, but with Apple you're forced to use theirs. This can be both a blessing and a curse.

In this case, it's just unfortunate luck.

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