App Review, Never Change

Fat chance of Apple enforcing the notification rules. Their built-in Fitness app gave me a marketing notification for Fitness+ the other day. Granted, it only happened once, but still obnoxious.

App Review has its problems.

it's pretty shitty of them to give App Store features to a certain developer that just made a clone of apps that have been around on the Mac App Store for ~10 years..... while treating the original devs like shit of course

Really starting to wonder how much longer Apple can coast on built-up goodwill from over a decade prior. They're still only so successful because the alternatives are still somehow even worse. But Apple keeps seeing how far they can let things slip before they have actual repercussions.

If anyone in government actually understood technology and was able to actual work for their constituents, Apple would have received a lot more pressure on this specific issue a long time ago. It's so arbitrary and capricious and dangerous to the entire concept of software that they really need to be stopped.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll no doubt say it again—I'm finding it harder and harder to feel any sympathy for developers who continue to participate in this charade. Especially Mac developers. We have far better alternatives!

A lot of us jump up and down blaming Apple—and sure, Apple isn’t our friend—but the truth is, we’re often our own worst enemies. By sticking with it, we’re enabling the problem just as much as they are.

Well, for me, ever since I tried first last Saturday for the first time in 3 months, my uploads for Find Any File do not appear on appstoreconnect at all any more!

Xcode (also tried Transporter.app) reports that the upload went well, no warnings, and that it's now "processing", but it they never appear on the website (well, briefly a placeholder appear, but after a few minutes it's all gone). Yet, when I upload again, I'm told that the I need to increase the build number now. So Apple _has_ a record of my upload, it just doesn't show them any more.

I have another app, iClip, which still uploads and appears just fine.

I have not made any changes to the FAF app (i.e. I tried uploading the same code that I had published in January successfully, just with updated build numbers - no gain). Not getting an email about any issues from Apple, either (I still get similar emails for the iClip app, which produced a warning, so it's not an issue on my end).

Contacted Support but only got a response that indicated that they didn't understand the issue, and after trying to clarify, it's silence now.

Oh, and the iClip submission was again rejected for not being sandboxed, even though I explain clearly in the submission comments that it's exempt from it ("grandfathered" for being in the MAS since 2010), but they never read that, clearly. I have to reply "please read the comment" and then they usually release it without further comment. Sigh.

Okay - support finally explained why the upload got discarded: The app's icon file name specified in Info.plist is a symlink to a different file in the same directory (Content/Resources). While I had done so in the past years, and macOS/Finder has never had an issue with this either (i.e. it shows the symlinked icon), something recently changed in their validation process and flags this needlessly. Well, not flags, because I never get a notification about it. They had to look into the logs. So, two bugs in one. Classic.