Tyler Hall:
Rejected after six days waiting for review, and four minutes after launching the app for the first time.
The app uses one or more entitlements which do not appear to have matching functionality within the app.
com.apple.security.network.server
I guess they never opened the Settings window during all the time they spent reviewing the app?
Tyler Hall:
App Review rejected Iris for a second time, this time for two reasons.
They again claimed the app uses the com.apple.security.network.server entitlement without matching functionality - even though I responded to the first rejection with an annotated screenshot and detailed explanation showing the server feature in the app.
They asked for more information about how Iris uses face recognition data - asking me to quote from my privacy policy - despite both the privacy policy and the app itself explaining that no data (including face data) ever leaves your Mac and all processing happens entirely on-device.
Ironically, their rejection included a screenshot of Iris’s Settings window—showing the Privacy tab that explains exactly this.
Pasi Salenius:
My MAS app used to go through in under an hour, now takes close to a week.
And there’s a big difference between waiting a week to be approved vs. waiting a week just to begin the process of arguing over specious violations.
Jeff Johnson:
I’ve always found it odd that Apple appears to be bragging about these statistics, yet if you do the math, the statistics turn out to be somewhat embarrassing. Based on the 2024 numbers, over 130K app submissions every week reviewed by nearly (in other words, fewer than) 500 “dedicated experts” (a characterization I would question) means 260 reviews per week on average by each reviewer. If we assume, extremely generously, that 500 reviewers work 40 hours every week with no meetings, no training, no breaks, and no vacations, that leaves less than 10 minutes of review time on average for each submission.
[…]
You might ask why Apple, the most profitable corporation in history, with a 77% gross margin in “services” revenue, that could obviously afford to hire more app reviewers, doesn’t also hire better reviewers, more qualified, actual experts in app development and the market? The answer to my rhetorical question is that app reviewer is an unpleasant job, mostly mindless rule-following, repetitive, facing constant deadlines, reminiscent of assembly-line work. It’s a virtual assembly line.
[…]
It isn’t intended to be true curation, and thus, by no surprise, it isn’t true curation. From Apple’s perspective, adding more reviewers would just add to their costs without adding to their profits, which is the point of the App Store, and reviewers were never particularly good at stopping scams, so the investment in more inescapably low-skill reviewers wouldn’t necessarily bring substantial returns. I’m sure that Apple wants to avoid the embarrassment of scams in the store, but Apple can’t do that without fundamentally changing the nature of the App Store and software distribution on iOS, so they live with the embarrassment and rely on Apple apologists to hand-wave away the problem as “a few bad apples.”
Previously:
App Review App Store Rejection Iris Mac Mac App Mac App Store
OpenAI (Hacker News):
This proof is an important milestone for the math and AI communities. It marks the first time that a prominent open problem, central to a subfield of mathematics, has been solved autonomously by AI. It also demonstrates the depth of reasoning these systems now support.
[…]
The proof is available here. The companion paper by leading external mathematicians is available here. You can find an abridged version of the model’s chain of thought here .
Artificial Intelligence Math OpenAI
Jeff Johnson:
Several of these apps have a link to a privacy policy web page that’s hosted on a generic free site such as sites.google.com, docs.google.com, github.io, wixsite.com, or vercel.app, which is always a bad sign. A couple of the apps use URL shorteners for the privacy policy link: bit.ly and shorturl.at. Why is that even allowed?!? And some of the privacy policy links are broken, returning HTTP 404 Not Found. Does Apple App Store review even look at the privacy policies?
[…]
I don’t know whether this surfeit of YouTube apps was the product of multiple developers acting independently or one developer hiding behind multiple Apple accounts, an App Store scam that I’ve seen before. I’ve never heard of any of these developers, and I doubt that you have either, not even AdBlocker LLC, the developer of App for YouTube ℠, who is not to be confused with Adblock Inc, the developer of AdBlock, who is to be confused with Eyeo GmbH, the developer of Adblock Plus, who acquired Adblock Inc in 2021. Got that? In any case, many duplicate app names with random symbols at the end is clearly a perverse experience for App Store users, and Apple’s so-called curation is primarily to blame. Moreover, almost all of these apps have pricey subscriptions, another App Store red flag that I’ve discussed before.
Previously:
App Review App Store Scams Mac Mac App Mac App Store Trademark YouTube
Sarah Perez (Hacker News):
The era of the “ten blue links” is officially over.
At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined “intelligent search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago.
Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch “information agents” to gather information on a user’s behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs.
[…]
While Google says that AI Mode is not the default experience, Search’s user interface encourages users to ask follow-up questions instead of scrolling down to the links to other pages.
John Gruber:
Odd, to me, to paint this only in terms of user convenience (ostensible user convenience at that), and not in terms of this being a de facto attack on Zillow and the rest of the web.
Nilay Patel (2024):
There’s a theory I’ve had for a long time that I’ve been calling “Google Zero” — my name for that moment when Google Search simply stops sending traffic outside of its search engine to third-party websites.
Amanda Silberling (Hacker News):
On Google’s video announcing the Search updates, one commenter wrote, “this is the best advertisement for letting people know it’s time to get a different search engine.”
[…]
If you’re curious about alternative search engines, you’re in the right place. Here are some places to start (or, embrace chaos and see where Open Web Engine takes you).
Previously:
Artificial Intelligence Google Gemini/Bard Google Search Web
