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

andyibanez.com

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

#131

Post by nickflood »

andy_ppp wrote: post #92
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…

I have this horrible feeling that you'll soon buy the government you want; Amazon or Facebook Gov is a terrifying idea: "do you want to add on the international development budget for £14.99 per month". I wonder if it would be better than what we currently have?

Competition in a government space would be a good thing, imo. For a while at least. Beats being quite permanently attached to a shitty gov at birth.

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

#132

Post by kalleboo »

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…

Yeah app review have been surprisingly reasonable to deal with, from the "they seem like humans" point of view.

It sounds like OP is dealing with the account fraud department instead

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

#133

Post by mhee »

xiphias2 wrote: post #117
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.

Yeah maybe this was it. Any significant changes must be reviewed again.

But from the way it sounds the author was not actively developing the application, so I am not sure how many changes went into each 90 day revision, perhaps Apple does not look kindly on resubmitting a build just for the sake of resetting the TestFlight 90 day activity counter. This might be seen as a way to try and avoid deployment and the final app review process.

The 90 day counter is mentioned here https://testflight.apple.com/ Look for it under "Testing"

From the way I have understood the 90 day counter before is that the app should be updated with new functionality/patches to be more beta tested, otherwise your app is obviously not being developed so no need for beta testing anymore

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

#134

Post by jamil7 »

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…

Google can be a real pain in the arse with this due to their absolute lack of customer support. I had my Play Store developer account locked due to some automated trigger that I had no control over or anyone to reach out too. The upside in comparison to the app store I 'spose is I'm free to distribute my Android apps via other means.

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

#135

Post by vetinari »

kabacha wrote: post #121
ksec wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Visa blocked users from giving their money to political causes they decided didn't aligned with their view of the world. That is why I am absolutely against abolishing paper cash. Edit: I know there are countries where you have a democratically elected representatives and every part of the government and even companies is held ( more or less ) accountable to the people and does not need to worry ( much ) about big b…

At one point abolishing paper cash is even remotely plausible? maybe in 100 years? So far cash rules majority of the world and I don't see it going away any time soon.

That would depend on a country. Sweden? Probably easy. South-Eastern Asia? 100 years would be too optimistic.

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

#137

Post by mhee »

princekolt wrote: post #103
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…

You can’t monetize an app in test flight. All purchases are fake and collect no money. This argument is bullshit. I know a bunch of apps that have been in TestFlight for ages, and they’re all up and well.

No need for your unconstructive argument

"Note, however, that apps using TestFlight cannot be distributed to testers in exchange for compensation of any kind, including as a reward for crowd-sourced funding."

If you have taken the time to read the information posted you would see that the information is relevant on monetization outside of the app.

I am just giving possible considerations for the author that they haven't consider in the article, we don't know how the app link has been distributed throughout the last 3 years, maybe they posted a donation link somewhere before and Apple considered this as compensation for the beta distribution of the app.

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

#138

Post by kalleboo »

jpalomaki wrote: post #71

Might be that they just don’t like the idea of image board browser. Apple is somewhat strict on what kind of content the apps are providing to user (See ”Objectionable Content” [1]) Techically this is of course just like web browser, but Apple could see it differently. [1] Objectionable Content

Then you reject the app in App Review, not terminate the account for "Fraud"

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

#139

Post by dbuder »

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…

They flat out lie and say that a decision was automated when it wasn't, how can you trust these hucksters.

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

#140

Post by JimDabell »

bad_user wrote: post #17
traceroute66 wrote: post #4

The problem with all these "Apple is being nasty to me" stories that have been appearing recently is that there appears to be a strong smell of "two sides to every story". I have not read the blog post above fully, but a speed-read suggests that the author was publicly distributing an app through TestFlight rather than App Store. I am not accusing anyone of anything here. But if my speed-read is accurate, then its no…

Author says that he develops app in his free time, did not have time to push it to app store properly and that he has 200 beta testers. Apps with a public invitation link for testing are common and if the delay is the problem here, then Apple should have said so. What's completely unacceptable here is that Apple does not specifically say what the author did wrong and this can't be defended by apologists. What is surp…

> Author says that he develops app in his free time, did not have time to push it to app store properly and that he has 200 beta testers. Apps with a public invitation link for testing are common and if the delay is the problem here, then Apple should have said so.

I agree that Apple’s lack of communication with developers is a massive problem, but I also think there are a couple of gaps in his story that need filling in.

TestFlight betas expire after a short amount of time – one or two months, if I remember correctly. He says the application has been available through TestFlight for three years. This means that he will have had to publish a new build well over a dozen times to keep it active for this amount of time. And if it’s already on TestFlight with external testers, it’s really not much effort at all to push it live. The build is already in Apple’s system – you've got to fill out a couple more form fields and click submit.

So looking at it that way… he gets hundreds of users, keeps pushing new builds to those users on a regular basis for three years, but never submits it to go through the public App Store review process. If I were Apple, I’d think he was probably trying to bypass the review process as well. Apps with a public invitation link are common, but this behaviour is not.

But yes, they should talk to him about it and this is a failure on Apple’s part even if he is acting suspiciously. I’ve been saying for a while that Apple need a VP of Developer Relations to take ownership of this type of thing, because it seems clear nobody owns it at the moment.

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