41–50 of 235 posts
> 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 hav…
I wonder how many people are turned off by iOS and have never bothered to learn to write an app for it in the first place?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Scammers will manage to manipulate people into giving away all of their savings just fine no matter what restrictions are put in place. The excuse is just another "think of the children" to maintain control and profit.
We don't have to make it trivially easy.
I wonder what the internals of the App Store process are. For most app approval processes you can tell because you'll get connections from the Philippines etc. so I assume what's going on here is that these reviewers have a range of English proficiency with a median below what an American developer is used to. Then the rest is just hallucination from the human, guessing at what they're looking at.
All of my app review submissions come back at like 2-3am, so yeah. We had a client whose website geoblocked non-US IPs and failed several rounds of review until we gave up and put a copy of their privacy policy on S3.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Exactly, computers should only be allowed to do what expert gatekeepers deem safe. There is no possible way to allow competent users to bypass this. Even if they had to go submit a blood sample and sign a document in front of a judge, grandma would just do it anyway! Lock it all down and make sure that compilers require a government license.
Pro: I can use a convoluted process to install an astronomy app Apple didn't like.
Con: Billions of dollars of life savings siphoned off with devastating consequences.
I'm by no means a maximalist on either side of this, but technologists aren't the only ones who get a say here.
I pointed out that there were a couple other E-rated apps that show the exact same image, and many more T-rated ones that only warn of "In-App Purchases" — no "Violence" label. One of the latter is the official Google TV app [0], so I sent some screenshots of that, and asked if maybe they were "crushing the competition" by avoiding their own review process, to see if that would escalate my case (no such luck).
[0] The image is still the same in the Google TV app, and Google Search surfaces the image in question S1 E10: https://www.google.com/search?q=landman+season+1
> 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 hav…
App stores should not exist in a world where only two phone operating systems exist. All apps MUST be installable via web.
Come on, EU. Help us out here. Free us from distribution tyranny. Do it before Google morphs into the same hell beast.
Soon you won't be able to read unapproved, unattested bytes. It's coming. We need as many freedoms as we can get.
Apple can be a great company without the app store monopoly. So can Google.
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 pub…
many years ago we made a list of malware apps on the Mac App Store:
https://www.corecode.io/_malware_on_the_macappstore.html
(yes, the list was made after being disgruntled because totally legitimate apps were refused for nonsense reasons just like in this story)
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.)