Sami Fathi:
The Dutch Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) has ruled that Apple’s plan to allow App Store dating apps to use third-party payment methods for in-app purchases does not sufficiently meet the requirements of a previous ruling. As a result, the ACM has hit Apple with an initial 5 million euro fine as a consequence, and fines will continue to be assessed at 5 million euros per week up to a maximum of 50 million euros until Apple complies.
ACM:
Apple has failed to satisfy the requirements on several points. The most important one is that Apple has failed to adjust its conditions, as a result of which dating-app providers are still unable to use other payment systems. At the moment, dating-app providers can merely express their ‘interest’. In addition, Apple has raised several barriers for dating-app providers to the use of third-party payment systems. That, too, is at odds with ACM’s requirements. For example, Apple seemingly forces app providers to make a choice: either refer to payment systems outside of the app or to an alternative payment system. That is not allowed. Providers must be able to choose both options.
Francisco Tolmasky:
It must be really frustrating to roll out an entire plan only to be completely at the whim of a reviewer — err, regulator — to find out whether it sufficiently meets a set of vague criteria.
John Gruber:
Apple could just write them a check for €50 million now, from the company’s spare-change-under-the-sofa account. Or they could just pull dating apps from the App Store in the Netherlands.
Previously:
Update (2022-01-25): David Heinemeier Hansson:
This is the problem with fines. They put a price on criminal behavior, and if the gains from committing those crimes exceed the cost of the fines, there’s a base hyper-rational calculus that says the company should continue to break the law.
Jesper:
What you can’t do is argue these things and then turn around and say that it’s all fine when Apple is doing it to developers. Time after time, Apple has either completely missed or blatantly ignored what makes a sensible application for developers and users, focusing on what draws in more money or tightens the regulatory noose.
A recent installment of the ongoing Floatplane App Review saga is instructive. Floatplane COO Luke Lafreniere has ongoing issues with getting a media network app already on the App Store through review, and time after time struggles despite carbon copying solutions adopted by big and successful apps on the App Store, to the point of copying UI wording verbatim.
Antitrust App Store App Store Rejection Apple Business Dating Apps Entitlements In-App Purchase iOS iOS 15 Legal Netherlands
Eric Meyer:
A few people, including Jen Simmons, gave credit to Igalia for implementing :focus-visible by means of a crowdfunding project (more on that in a moment).
[…]
Nobody at Apple asked the crowd to fund anything. Nobody at Apple asked Igalia to crowdfund anything. They didn’t even ask Igalia to implement :focus-visible, and then Igalia decided to crowdfund the work. In fact, all of those assumptions get things almost exactly backwards — which is understandable! It’s what we expect from our experience of how the web has developed since at least the late 1990s. But here, something new happened.
[…]
Of its own volition, Igalia decided to experiment with the idea of letting the web community (the “crowd”) vote for implementation of a missing browser feature with their wallets (the “funding”).
Update (2022-01-25): Jason Snell:
I sure wish I could crowdfund features that Apple doesn’t care about in my favorite apps and have Apple add them to its code base! But only in very particular circumstances—when there’s an open-source project at the core—can it happen. And yet when it happened in this case, the reaction in some quarters was to complain. Why am I not surprised?
CSS iOS iOS 15 Mac macOS 12 Monterey Open-source Software Safari WebKit
GoodNotes:
HTTP 503 is a temporary error code (“Service unavailable”) indicating iCloud servers aren’t responding correctly to requests from your devices. The error typically gets resolved as GoodNotes automatically retries, but we’re getting many reports of the error lingering on, causing sync failures.
This issue is not apparent to us and we’ve escalated the case to Apple Technical Support team for investigation. It seems it’s happening to other apps as well.
My devices haven’t reported any error codes, but iCloud Drive and Photos have been particularly unreliable and slow for the last week or so. As far as I can tell, eventually all my data did sync. Others, though, have reported losing records and files.
Chad Etzel:
well, add me to the pile of ppl making an iCloud status dashboard for my app
Paul Haddad:
iCloud errors seem to have really increased over the last couple of days. Wonder how many devs have to add these for Apple to I don’t know fix the problems or at the very least publicly acknowledge them.
Craig Grannell:
So pissed off with Apple’s iCloud today. Wasted almost an entire day to it throwing up 503 errors. My backup Apple ID is fine, so it seems like my main ID has been rate-limited for some reason. Bloody infuriating. So much for “it just works”.
RawMean:
iCloud Drive returns a 503 error (service unavailable) since Nov. and it’s affecting all apps that use iCloud Drive. @AppleSupport has not done anything about this and more AppleIDs are being affect.
Adam Overholtzer:
Supposedly they are aware of it, but it’s been going on for weeks — there are forum discussions going back to early December if not earlier.
MeanRaw:
DTS did confirm that the problem is on the server side. But they said it’s outside their jurisdiction and provided no ETA. This started in November
Craig Grannell (tweet):
Then Soulver failed — suddenly and very badly. I needed to restart my iMac so was shutting down all my apps. Soulver threw up a permissions error. A week of input was wiped out in an instant. This was a shock on multiple fronts: in part because of the data loss, but also because Soulver is one of the most robust apps I use. It had never failed before. […] The culprit was clearly iCloud.
[…]
A quick look on Reddit had already suggested to me that the problem had in fact been around for months, rather than days; terrifyingly, Zervaas said he’d seen this issue “on and off since May 2021”, and his own app only currently fully works on some of his Apple IDs.
Becky Hansmeyer:
Ok, there’s clearly an issue going on with iCloud sync right now affecting a lot of users across many different apps. What’s the best way to report this? Radar? I haven’t made any changes to my app since October and users have just recently started reporting sync failures.
Juli Clover:
iCloud failures are a major problem for app developers because the end user of the app doesn’t know that it’s an Apple issue, so customers blame the app developers for a non-working sync feature that they have no control over.
Malcolm Owen:
Outside of Apple Technical Support queries, there has yet to be any official confirmation of an issue from Apple, that it exists or is being actively investigated.
The System Status page is useless, as always.
Becky Hansmeyer:
This is an Apple screw-up of discoveryd proportions.
By the way, I wonder what’s going on with discoveryd these days. Presumably, mDNSResponder was being rewritten for good reasons. Is it slowly being refactored to address the original motiviations for discoveryd? Is a new discoveryd-style rewrite in progress? Did they just decide to leave this code untouched?
Previously:
Update (2022-01-24): Steve Troughton-Smith:
Developer sound off: if you’ve recently been struggling with iCloud sync issues in your apps that sound like they may be related to today’s news, can you reply with whether you’re seeing this with 1) iCloud Drive, 2) CloudKit + your own data model, or 3) CloudKit+Core Data
Craig Hockenberry:
I hate to say this, but iCloud can’t be trusted. It’s disheartening because there has been improvements in the past couple of years.
[…]
The most infuriating part about this is Apple’s complete silence in public.
Privately, they are telling developers there are issues, which is a step in the right direction.
But it’s our customers who are losing the fucking data.
Update (2022-01-25): Rod Christiansen:
I had an iA Writer document literally revert back in front of my eyes to a version from 5 minutes ago!
Happened twice today.
MacJournals:
Analysts could do worse than asking about things like this during Thursday’s conference call.
If services are Apple’s future, how can these problems persist for months? Why is iCloud designed so neither devs nor users can get answers or escalate?
Chris Vasselli:
I believe the key is handling rate limiting properly, which CloudKit (erroneously) returns as 503 errors. But there are some gotchas to watch out for:
[…]
The suggested retry period is too short, and repeating your request after that period will trigger rate limiting again (seriously).
[…]
If there were multiple errors, they will be returned as a single error with a partialErrorsByItemID value containing the underlying errors. The parent error will not contain the retry information, you need to check the underlying errors.
I have seen certain errors (specifically zoneBusy and requestRateLimited) actually omit the CKErrorRetryAfterKey value, and so I have a default value of 30 seconds in case it is missing.
Quota exceeded errors (meaning the user is out of iCloud space) seem to erroneously include CKErrorRetryAfterKey values, even though retrying them is not actually going to help.
[…]
After reading more, it looks like there is more going on here than just properly handling the retry timeout. Some accounts are getting 503’s on all requests, no matter what.
Update (2022-01-26): Becky Hansmeyer:
Regarding the recent iCloud sync issue, I received a very kind and detailed response from Apple indicating that the underlying issue causing the 503 errors/sync failures has been fixed!
Adam Overholtzer:
Will I get an email? What about an apology? What about a removal of all the 1-star reviews this nonsense has earned me the past few weeks?
Seems like this issue, affecting essentially the entire platform, unfolded and was eventually resolved with no official communications from Apple acknowledging the problem or fix.
Paul Haddad:
The number of iCloud Sync is broken reports we’ve gotten over the last 2 days has gone down to basically 0.
See also: MacRumors.
Update (2022-01-31): Jesse Squires:
But as a developer, the iCloud issues are even more frustrating. Sure, we all know software is hard. Minor, intermittent issues are to be expected. But two things are unacceptable — data loss and the (still!) terrible communication from Apple.
If Apple fails to maintain quality software and prevent data loss — that affects our users and there isn’t much we can do about it. Apple strongly promotes these services. Apple really wants third-party devs to integrate iCloud support into their apps. And yet, they seemingly can’t be bothered to make it reliable. Among the many other issues that developers have with the App Store, this ranks at the top. Third-party developers must pay 15-30 percent of their wages to Apple. And for what? What are we paying for? A totally broken iCloud? Developers that depend on iCloud get doubly screwed.
And then, to make matters worse, developers received zero communication from Apple during this outage — not even an acknowledgement that an issue existed.
A few days after the supposed fix, my iCloud Drive uploads broke again.
Craig Grannell:
Same here. iCloud sync for apps is now OK here, but iCloud Drive is totally dead. Nothing is uploading. FFS. This is ridiculous.
Previously:
Update (2022-02-04): Howard Oakley:
iCloud provides users with one real control: the on-off switch, which isn’t in the least helpful when the problem is failure to sync. My free utility Cirrus can perform a basic test of the first of the three services, and gives access to iCloud entries in your Mac’s log. But those only help in diagnosis, not in treatment.
Cirrus does enable you to download files in the first service category (and you could also use this with shared files used by third-party apps). That enables you to ensure that you keep a local copy, which will also be backed up by Time Machine and other means of local backup. But it does nothing to help you sync those documents with or through iCloud when the service is faulty.
Update (2022-03-16): Adam Overholtzer:
Just say no to CloudKit! My app has 1000s of 5-Star ratings but the stupid Error 500 thing got me enough bad reviews that I’ve dipped below a 4.7 average for the first time. I also never got a word about it from Apple, despite a DTS report and being quoted in a couple articles.
Update (2023-12-19): Adam Overholtzer:
I’m getting another surge of email about iCloud/CloudKit sync errors, specifically Error 500, unspecified internal server error.
This seems to happen every year around this time, except this year it already happened back in August.
Lots of developers are reporting this lately.
Bug CloudKit Datacide iA Writer iCloud iCloud Drive iOS iOS 15 Mac macOS 12 Monterey Photos.app Soulver Tweetbot
Emily Dolson (via Hacker News):
Uh,
@googledrive, are you doing okay? This file literally contains a single line with the number “1”.
Presumably nobody manually added the hash of that data to a list, so this is probably some sort of AI mistake.
The worst part is that the error message says: “A review cannot be requested for this restriction.”
ChicagoBoy11:
I experienced something similar building an internal tool on GSuite. I had a large file with sequences of 9 digit numbers specific to our use-case, all tied to names of people (employees). Whelp, at one point the tool I was working on stopped working, and it was flagged as apparently containing social security numbers (which I suppose matched the character length).
Whelp, on the admin panel, you can get a report of those files, and then mark it as a false positive. Which I did. But then nothing happened, and nothing changed. It was no use.
The hilarious bit: It did, of course, allow me to make a copy of the file in question, and then just point the resource I was building to the new file, which was exactly the same. Weeks later... so far, so good.
Previously:
Update (2022-01-25): Elan Ruskin:
The same algorithm that did this also has the power to just lock you out of all Google services, permanently cutting off off your access to your emails and whatever else you’ve stored with them. As has happened before.
Previously:
Artificial Intelligence Copyright Google Drive Google GSuite iOS iOS 15 Mac macOS 12 Monterey Web
Apple:
In 2020, we chose to support apps and developers that needed to adapt services from in-person to digital as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we deferred App Store Review Guideline 3.1.1, which requires apps offering paid online group services to do so via in-app purchase.
Given the recent resurgence of COVID and its continued impact on in-person services, we’ve extended the most recent deadline to June 30, 2022.
Just two months ago, Apple posted a reminder that the December 31, 2021 deadline would stand. Now, three weeks later, it doesn’t. Even in early November it was clear that COVID was not going away by the end of the year.
Michael Love:
If I were a $3T American tech behemoth facing down the imminent passage of brutal new antitrust laws, I would simply say “oops, never mind” about taxing struggling small businesses that switched to Zoom over the pandemic, but what do I know.
Previously:
App Store App Store Review Guidelines Business COVID-19 Facebook In-App Purchase iOS iOS 15
