Surely its enough to get a Hacker News person to give you a claim waiver or something? I mean, did you try contacting the HN folks?
Actually I did ask them, they (unsurprisingly) didn't have anything like that.
My App Is Dead in the Water
31–40 of 206 posts
Re: My App Is Dead in the Water
#32Is 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.
It's using the official Hacker News API (https://github.com/HackerNews/API), not scraping web sites.
Re: My App Is Dead in the Water
#33This 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."
Even the Hangouts client opens links which people send me in its own internal browser— a behaviour I actually don't care for, since I'd prefer it spawned tabs in the regular Safari app. But it's exactly the same thing this guy is getting in trouble for.
Re: My App Is Dead in the Water
#34> - 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.
Aside: Is there a reasonable way to get any non-American/non-English news in the news app?
I find it a bit mindblowing that "Discover Channels" and the topics list are all in English and for a country I don't live in. For example, there's an option to add every BBC subcategory except BBC Mundo (i.e. Latin America).
Re: My App Is Dead in the Water
#35Is 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.
It's using the official Hacker News API ( https://github.com/HackerNews/API ), not scraping web sites.
I think dewey is asking about the articles linked from HN, not HN itself. The post implies that when you click on an article from NYT/NPR/etc, it shows the content inside the app (since there's a separate button to open it in Safari), doesn't it?
Re: My App Is Dead in the Water
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rules 1 and 2.
What are you refering to? HN guidelines? I was just trying to be funny as well as point out the obvious reason why Apple won't care about him :)
I think it's a play on a fairly common meme from Reddit. Early example here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/seduction/comments/3cdmps/rule_1_be...
Re: My App Is Dead in the Water
#37I wouln't like if someone scraped my web site, and put it in a iPhone app. Why not just open the links in a web browser !?
...that's what the app is doing.
It was just opening the links in a webview inside the app instead of tossing the user over into Safari every time they click a link. There was no scraping happening.
Re: My App Is Dead in the Water
#38Looks like Apple has a history of removing third party reader apps. See a discussion from a couple years ago on Reddit apps getting nuked: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/4edaee/looks_like_t... edit: looks like that time it was for NSFW content....
It should be well known by now that Apple developers serve at the pleasure of the king (https://blog.codinghorror.com/serving-at-the-pleasure-of-the...).
Re: My App Is Dead in the Water
#39Why not launch Safari when the user clicks on an article? And make it clear that you have permission from HN to use their API?
Having used your app for exactly one minute, that seems like it would address their concerns and preserve usability.
Re: My App Is Dead in the Water
#40I see the comments are already filling up with the usual cries of how this is what you get when you play in a curated market, but something about this doesn't make sense.
Apple provides several views specifically designed to show web content: UIWebView, WKWebView, and SFSafariViewController. This ruling of theirs would apply to all uses of these views that aren't for specific domains and URLs known in advance, which makes no sense.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of apps across all kinds of categories that display websites within the app. I've personally launched dozens of apps that have this functionality and never received a rejection for it, or heard of anyone who has.
Moreover, there are no mechanisms that I'm even aware of to provide Apple with proof of "permission" to display a URL. So the path you're supposed to take is to wait for a rejection and then submit that proof to the reviewer in your resubmission? Or is this supposed to go in the review notes? Presumably you saying you have permission isn't enough, so what do they want, a link to a PDF of a signed contract that their legal team can review? Really doubt it.
None of this is meant to be defensive of Apple or an attack on the author of this article. It just sounds like there was a mistake or error in communication somewhere. I don't think Apple's intent here is to disallow any app that opens a URL, but I guess we'll see.