Movist Removed From the Mac App Store
This is because Apple has refused to update the app, and they have also removed from the App Store the already accepted version.
What Apple pointed out was that Movist has a feature of “downloading 3rd party media”. So we removed the Safari Extension to allow YouTube videos to be played in Movist and removed the feature from Movist too. But Apple still refused to update because Movist has that feature yet. After all, we had no choice but to remove all streaming functionality from Movist.
5.2.3 Audio/Video Downloading: Apps should not facilitate illegal file sharing or include the ability to save, convert, or download media from third party sources (e.g. Apple Music, YouTube, SoundCloud, Vimeo, etc.) without explicit authorization from those sources. Streaming of audio/video content may also violate Terms of Use, so be sure to check before your app accesses those services. Documentation must be provided upon request.
It doesn’t look like the app is intended for saving media. I don’t see what would be objectionable about streaming—any app with a Web view can already do that.
Previously: IINA 1.0.
4 Comments RSS · Twitter
Streaming YouTube content using a method that bypass the ads is probably in violation of YouTube rules, while using a WebView is not.
@John-Daniel It’s not clear to me that it bypasses ads. But if that were the issue, you’d think they’d just update the app to either not do so or to block streaming of YouTube URLs.
They have a Movist Pro version on their site that still has the Safari plug-in and allows you to stream from their app.
The Pro version will recognize the MAS version to activate itself and won't require a new license.
Since my tweets tend to disappear here's an archive.is URL: https://archive.fo/WDciR
The Movist Pro plugin works in Chrome, Safari, Firefox IIRC. And it works the same:
- Go to a YT video
- Click the button
- BaseURL is loaded and displayed in Movist.
It's buffer "streamed" and not "downloaded" & actually plays the stream chunks. Even tho Movist (and IINA) both use the youtube-dl CLI binary there's no enduser control, so the enduser can't "download" the stream per se. Also if the baseURL contained a preroll of ads the plugins would play that too.
If the Youtube baseURL contains advertising conceivably both browser plugins would play that unless the user blocks ads at the network layer (say, with a netfilter) so I do not know what (macOS) AppStore review is on about. There are other tools that actually *do* capture and convert Youtube, DailyMotion, etc but AppStore review doesn't seem to know the difference.
