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App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours

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Re: App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours

#22

This kind of thing reminds me of why I've always felt there shouldn't be a gatekeeper. Add your repos, install your apps. Folks should be allowed to have more than one repo to install apps from.

But if you allow users to have freedom, grandma will get hacked! We should all be told what to do and where to go and rely on gatekeepers for permission, for safety. (And no, of course there’s not any solution that would allow competent individuals to go outside the safe zone.)

Re: App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours

#25
post #3

What an insane ruling considering Co-Star is entirely an astrology app and was picked as an app store "Editor's Choice" at some point.

They arn't against Astrology apps. It's that there are a few categories where apple has just stopped allowing new ones since there are so many.

Are those documented anywhere?

Re: App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours

#26
> But that’s not what happened at all. Godier proceeded through a series of escalations up to the App Review Board and the Review Board responded that they determined the original rejection was valid because, I shit you not, “We understand that the app includes a live tarot reading feature.”

> It has no tarot function, no horoscopes, and nothing that I, or anyone else I’ve asked, would associate with astrology.

I have dealt with the Byzantine App Store bureaucracy before. What you do here, is you submit a new version, pretty much identical to the previous one, with the comment “tarot function removed”.

Re: App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours

#27
post #3

What an insane ruling considering Co-Star is entirely an astrology app and was picked as an app store "Editor's Choice" at some point.

They arn't against Astrology apps. It's that there are a few categories where apple has just stopped allowing new ones since there are so many.

if true. this is insane

Re: App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours

#28
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They arn't against Astrology apps. It's that there are a few categories where apple has just stopped allowing new ones since there are so many.

Are those documented anywhere?

Somewhat, but still very subjective. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#spa...

You can still always get around them (at least my experience), but it just takes a lot of time

Re: App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours

#29
post #4

I am quite an Apple fan, but this dampens my enthusiasm considerably. How many great apps are rejected, but build by people without reach?

Their business model depends on you not looking too closely here. Apple has a lot of legitimate advantages, but they oversell the safety of the App Store quite a bit, and they also have an infamous review process for apps that deliberately hides both the reasoning and any sort of estimation of false positive / false negative rate. Google should have these sort of stats as well, but obviously neither company would publish them. False negatives should be observable by the public.

I'm a fan of letting users add repos from vendors they trust, so there isn't one centralized gatekeeper.

Re: App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours

#30

This kind of thing reminds me of why I've always felt there shouldn't be a gatekeeper. Add your repos, install your apps. Folks should be allowed to have more than one repo to install apps from.

But if you allow users to have freedom, grandma will get hacked! We should all be told what to do and where to go and rely on gatekeepers for permission, for safety. (And no, of course there’s not any solution that would allow competent individuals to go outside the safe zone.)

There's a saying about how hard it can be to design bear-resistant containers:

> There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.

The same is true for computers. Solutions that "allow competent individuals" to do something are also typically solutions scammers can convince Grandma to perform without understanding what they do.

(Case in point: I saw a fake captcha that told you to open Terminal and paste a command to "prove" you're human; https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/1rq4bh6/warning_suspic...)

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