Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

andyibanez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 357 posts

Re: Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

#111

Post by qhwudbebd »

nromiun wrote: post #45

> The big problem is that when Apple tells you that the reasons “are not limited” the ones they listed, it could be anything. They could call my face ugly and remove me from the Developer Program under that reason and tell me it was because of “fraud”. Seriously, just how hard is it for these companies to communicate properly? Would it kill them to send something like "We saw X on your account so we are closing your…

Apple's strategy against the web app workaround appears to be two-pronged: abandon any pretence at maintaining webkit whilst continuing locking out more competent browser engines. Even Microsoft in the IE era didn't actively ban Netscape from running on their platform...

Re: Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

#112

Post by gear54rus »

nromiun wrote: post #45

> The big problem is that when Apple tells you that the reasons “are not limited” the ones they listed, it could be anything. They could call my face ugly and remove me from the Developer Program under that reason and tell me it was because of “fraud”. Seriously, just how hard is it for these companies to communicate properly? Would it kill them to send something like "We saw X on your account so we are closing your…

Unsolvable.

> We saw X on your account so we are closing your account temporarily

There will always be some idiot who goes 'oh so you're descriminating against X' or some other bullshit but legally valid reason and sues them. Can't have that.

Re: Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

#113

Post by dgb23 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #31

I can only speak for myself, but I have had a number of interactions with the review team, and I have always ended up communicating with a human; although they would often paste “talking points” into their replies. Because of the nature of a couple of my apps, I’ve had them bounced for “providing commonly available services” (i.e. competing with OS tools). In each instance, I have appealed, citing some unique feature…

One of the nicest interactions I had with customer support was with Apple. It was a younger, very patient and helpful support.

At the start I also got canned responses, which was a bit frustrating (because I knew that these won’t help me in the slightest) but then I got real help and it also felt like the support actually wanted to help, which is often not the case in such scenarios.

I guess what I wanted to say is that this is what brings value to interacting in any business. You need to be able to listen and talk.

Re: Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

#114

Post by AsyncAwait »

FakeRemore wrote: post #51
jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selling software to users? Did you time travel from 1999 or something?

1) There are plenty of paid apps: https://appfigures.com/top-apps/ios-app-store/united-states/... 2) Taking his argument in good faith, he also means "free" apps with microtransactions, because in both cases the same situation exists: The iOS App Store is too big a market to ignore. Which leads to the same problem, regardless of whether your app is paid or "free", that if Apple suddenly decides it doesn't like you, y…

It's worth pointing out that you can absolutely sell software to Linux users i.e. I pay for all JetBrains software and recently purchased Ripcord[1].

What I've noticed on macOS however, is that is a lot easier to sell things that should be bundled or FLOSS for relatively serious money. For example there are dozens of rather expensive "Finder replacements" on macOS and you'll have a hard time selling something proprietary like that to Linux users because we do have good file managers that are libre software already.

1 - https://cancel.fm/ripcord

Re: Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

#115

Post by philliphaydon »

sethammons wrote: post #104
philliphaydon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had about 12 domains once and decided to park them as I was busy, set them all up on adsense, went to all the domains to make sure they all worked, a couple I refreshed a few times as it wasn't working properly. The next day I got an email saying my adsense was closed for 'fake views / clicks', no way to challenge it or anything. That was like 10 years ago. I still can't use adsense to this day.

seems like an easy option for Google would be to set a blocklist of IPs for generating revenue, including the IP used to create the account. Users could add others with the big scary label of "prevent us from banning you, list IPs here that you use" that defaults to your current IP.

Maybe they do something like that now. This was ~10 years ago. @BiteCode_dev's comment resonated with me because it happened to me. There wasn't a warning or anything, just an email terminating my account.

Slowly trying to disconnect everything away from google.

Re: Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

#116

Post by jcfields »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #64

And Apple is not even an isolated case. Google will close gmail accounts, take away adsense revenues, or remove youtube videos on a whim. Visa blocked users from giving their money to political causes they decided didn't aligned with their view of the world. For years Microsoft made it super hard to buy hardware without paying the Windows licence. They killed xbox remotely. They have invasive telemetry in Win 10. Pay…

Amazon suspended my parents' seller account last August or September with no explanation. All listings removed, couldn't log in, no direct customer service number that connects you with someone who knows what's going on, and kept taking the monthly fee anyway. Finally, they closed it entirely (again without explanation) a month or two ago. They're still holding their inventory in their distribution centers, probably a few thousand dollars worth. I'm sure they'll charge storage and shipping fees to send it back, so it's almost certainly not worth bothering about given how thin their margins were in the first place. Yeah, it's not a great direction we're going in here. These companies just don't have enough incentive to care.

Re: Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

#117

Post by xiphias2 »

mhee wrote: post #95

TestFlight has its limitations, unfortunately. It is not a distribution platform, it is not intended to be active for longer than 90 days without updates and should not be monetized https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#bet... I encourage you to read through the entire AppStore guidelines, there might be more sections that apply to Apple's decision to terminate the account I didn't read through all…

I don't see the 90 days rule in those guidelines.

As others have said, GMail was 5 years in beta, it's normal for products to be in beta for years as long as they are not monatized. Maybe he didn't get the updates reviewed according to the guidelines though.

Re: Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

#118

Post by 0-O-0 »

noir_lord wrote: post #63
0-O-0 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish the Hey story makes people realise that we can't depend on benevolence of two corporations and should be working on open platforms.

Open platforms are great (and they are, I say this as a Fedora user who just finished an install via dnf'ing all the things) but they lack the money which translates to marketing that large corporations have, it's not a case of a level playing field, we are playing two different games on entirely different fields and ours is mostly uphill. When your opposition has an absolute chokehold on major markets it's a near un…

Apple and Google are not primordial forces. At some point they've started small and had to compete/coexist with IBM, Yahoo etc.

There are still emerging markets and space for innovation. And next innovation might be based on something open, like Ubuntu Touch.

Re: Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

#119

Post by morganvachon »

nromiun wrote: post #45

> The big problem is that when Apple tells you that the reasons “are not limited” the ones they listed, it could be anything. They could call my face ugly and remove me from the Developer Program under that reason and tell me it was because of “fraud”. Seriously, just how hard is it for these companies to communicate properly? Would it kill them to send something like "We saw X on your account so we are closing your…

> Sorry for the rant.

Don't apologize, your rant is valid and unfortunately this issue is not limited to Apple. Google is infamous for closing accounts and sending an automated message along the lines of "You may have violated a rule. We won't tell you which rule, and we won't offer proof, deal with it." They don't just do this to their free users, it's happened to businesses using paid Google services for their core infrastructure. It's maddening that a corporation can get so big that it's effectively a human walking through an ant hill, oblivious to the thousands or even millions of lives it's disrupting in the name of moving forward and making profits.

Re: Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

#120

Post by _4msi »

pacamara619 wrote: post #88
rbrtl wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have the same choice the device users have. It's their right to choose their device, and it's your right to choose which provider you use or don't. It is not your right to reach all those people.

There's such a thing as antitrust laws you ancap, they don't even need to have a monopoly.

[flagged]
Post reply on HN