Live data from Hacker News

A Tumblr developer on the App Store approval process

sreegs.tumblr.com

91–100 of 165 posts

Re: A Tumblr developer on the App Store approval process

#91
post #49

Another Tumblr dev here: That's not even going into the monetization pieces. As we are implementing tipping and multi-merchant subscriptions in Post+, we still have to use In-App-Purchases with it's severely lacking API. The hoops we have to go through to get money from our App Store account to merchants are insane. We are using Stripe Connect infrastructure and Payouts API to do that, and that would be totally fine,…

Why do you deal with the app store and don't focus on web-only

Many, many users expect every single thing to be an app

Re: A Tumblr developer on the App Store approval process

#92
The old man in me thinks why bother participating in the App Store shenanigans at all in the first place? Why take all the stress? Just make something for the open web and enjoy life.

But, if no one speaks up, then the situation is going to only get worse. We don’t have a choice today, as Android ecosystem is worse than iOS. So here we are, almost 2022, still fighting extremely arrogant companies and walled gardens.

I really wish projects like pinephone etc take off.

Re: A Tumblr developer on the App Store approval process

#93

> In the case of Tumblr, this would be a reviewer going to search, typing in something like 'tits’ and finding porn. Just want to emphasize this part. App Store Reviewers are completely asinine. Like, dumb as a rock. It’d almost be funny if their stupidity didn’t block your app approval. To be explicitly clear: if your app contains UGC, they will explicitly go and search for things to ding you on, and then fault you…

Oh yeah. At my previous job at a large Russian social media company, I remember our app getting rejected over this. They went to the video section, disabled safe search, and searched "porn". Lo and behold, naked people came up! And this was the reason for rejection. Like, what tf did you expect to see by doing that, cat videos?! And it's not corporate America, so our ToS did not disallow porn. From our point of view, the app is just working as intended, and no rules were broken. And the app was rated 18+ anyway.

And then "illegal file sharing". On a strange coincidence, they started enforcing that one relentlessly just as Apple Music was preparing to launch. Yes, you could upload, search, and stream mp3s on our service without any regard to this dumb thing called "copyright". No, it's none of Apple's business to be policing any of this.

IMO, at this point, the only way out of this is for Apple to be forced by law to allow sideloading apps on iOS.

edit: I now vaguely remember that at some point we created special limited accounts for iOS reviewers. This somewhat eased the pain, but they would sometimes sign up for their own accounts too and see things they weren't meant to see. I didn't participate in any of this first-hand because I was working on the Android app.

Re: A Tumblr developer on the App Store approval process

#94
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you deal with the app store and don't focus on web-only

Many, many users expect every single thing to be an app

But you're incentivizing that behavior. How does that help (and tumblr is a blog, it s more usable as a website than as a website-in-an-app

Re: A Tumblr developer on the App Store approval process

#95

It's appalling to me that iOS developers still exist after all the hoops you have to jump through to get an iOS app out. I'm a web developer that got roped into developing and then publishing a react native app for android and iOS. The android process was relatively painless compared to the crap Apple has you do. For starters, you can't even produce an app build without running on iOS, so the company had to procure a…

> I need to connect to an iPhone as a target device in order to build. This is not correct. You can build just fine without any iOS device.

Alright, I looked around and finally came across this StackOverflow answer[0] that supports your point. Turns out, if you use let Xcode handle code signing for you, you need a physical device for it to target (which is what we were doing), however there also exists an option to manually sign code yourself, in which case you wouldn't need a physical device. Thanks for the correction, I'm glad to be wrong!

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/58920415

Re: A Tumblr developer on the App Store approval process

#96
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you deal with the app store and don't focus on web-only

Many, many users expect every single thing to be an app

This clearly isn't the whole truth given tumbler has a large banner asking you to download the app when you surf to the website.

Re: A Tumblr developer on the App Store approval process

#97

> In the case of Tumblr, this would be a reviewer going to search, typing in something like 'tits’ and finding porn. Just want to emphasize this part. App Store Reviewers are completely asinine. Like, dumb as a rock. It’d almost be funny if their stupidity didn’t block your app approval. To be explicitly clear: if your app contains UGC, they will explicitly go and search for things to ding you on, and then fault you…

> They will go to the search bar and type in “milf” or “butts” (I wish I were joking). They’ll try to search for drugs on your marketplace. I don’t understand why you think that’s dumb. This is what people who download the app will do, so they’re trying out real scenarios that will happen. They don’t want to have there be a segment on the nightly news saying, “App Store Full of Porn!” Which is what will happen in the…

So allow sideloading. Problem solved.

And as a nice bonus, app store would then have to actually compete with those alternate sources. As macOS shows, when the use of the app store is not mandatory, almost none of the developers will be taking the app store seriously and will instead handle the distribution of their apps themselves just fine.

Re: A Tumblr developer on the App Store approval process

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you? Reddit makes you change a setting, save it, reload the page, uncheck a couple more settings, save, before you can see adult content these days. per-account quick test logged out: search "butts" -> no nsfw results on first page search "tits" -> a couple unlabeled nsfw posts (against reddit rules.)

open a browser, navigate to https://www.reddit.com/r/tits/ , click yes, done!

Holy shit. Since when is there naked women on the Internet?

Re: A Tumblr developer on the App Store approval process

#100
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you deal with the app store and don't focus on web-only

Many, many users expect every single thing to be an app

So maybe don't have an iOS app and put a big banner where app links are that "we don't have an iOS app because of Apple's app store practices, learn more here".
Post reply on HN