iDOS 3 Rejected From the App Store

Maybe Gruber could have a game during his WWDC talk show where he would present to the Apple's SVPs some apps that have been rejected by Apple's politburo and ask them to:
1. clearly explain why a given app is rejected and which rule(s) it does not conform to.
2. what exactly should be changed.

@someone: We get it, you don't like John Gruber. You can stop telling us.

@NaOH: What about you stop policing what others say?

It would be a welcome change if Gruber held Apple to account for its hypocrisy. If he followed up on @someone's suggestion, we'd all learn something.

@NaOH
I'm okay if he tells us actually.

As to the topic, this is part of the reason people are working to dismantle the App Store. Arbitrary rulings, capriciously given. The App Review stuff has always been a joke. There are so many bad apps on the App Store. From gambling simulators masquerading as games to just broken, bad apps. There should be a way to verify lack of malware and does the app basically function without scams, that's pretty much it. Deciding what kind of apps go into our devices is just weird.

@Nathan_RETRO Especially when it’s so capricious and unreliable. If Apple showed some level of care and attention to what they were curating in their store, and that they were consistently blocking spam apps - well, I don’t how differently I’d feel about apps like iDOS being rejected, but I’d at least be _more_ amenable to the argument that protecting consumers and creating a safe marketplace is a reason for them to continue following policies.

But it seems Apple can’t even spend the bare minimum of effort to reliably reject scam apps the same way that, oh, say, Sony or Nintendo do for game consoles. There, the stores have become far more open in recent years, to the point there are plenty of low-quality titles in their stores that would never have been allowed onto shelves in the physical distribution days; yet they still manage to keep the vast majority of flat-out scams out.

I will allow that the barrier to entry for console stores is higher than owning a Mac, downloading a copy of Xcode, and giving Apple $99 - though again, it’s nowhere near as steep as it was in the days of physical distribution. But I don’t feel like that takes away from the simple fact that Apple is unable to effectively manage its own store with the policies and rules they have in place; and when they do choose to enforce those rules and policies, it’s very often ad-hoc, inconsistent and unclear in application, and swayed by public pressure or PR considerations.

@NaOH I’m not the “someone” in this thread, but like Nathan I also don’t mind seeing other people call out Gruber. I’ve very occasionally left a comment criticizing his takes (in the interest of disclosure, I was the one that suggested nicknaming him “John Goober”, which is childish and I regret), and maybe “someone” does it more frequently than I, but if you look among the comments of this blog there are many different people that call out Gruber for his takes for different reasons. It’s not just one person spamming each thread with the same stuff. Gruber tends to have weirdly anti-regulatory takes (like when he backed Comcast on being anti-net-neutrality of all things) and I think what you’re seeing is different people starting to notice a pattern in his opinions.

The whole App Store rule system is a castle of cards without foundations held together with bundles of cash. I don’t think it’s going to hold for long now that some politicians seem to have found some balls for rent and are starting to poke at the structure…

"...there are many different people that call out Gruber for his takes for different reasons."

By all means, call out "his takes," but the personal comments about him lower the quality of the conversations here and do nothing to help explore ideas.

@NaOH "the personal comments" Which personal comments?

A suggestion to host a game during his yearly show is not a personal comment. Maybe you don't read his website correctly, but I don't think he's one of the guys who do not see the problems with those stupid rejections as he frequently relays some of them and he is as puzzled as everyone.

Here, the problem is a company or at least a team within that company that is not able to justify some of its decisions based on the rules they established themselves. So since he's able to gather SVPs of this company in the same room for a discussion and that discussion happens in front of potentially a lot of 3rd party developers, it might be a good idea to ask these Apple representatives if they themselves have an explanation for some of these rejections.

Might be when I called him a xenophobic hack, she a failed app developer.

1) It's funny that people criticizing Gruber is taking attention away from Apple's failed policies - the point of this story
2) By all means, criticize Gruber, whose gross Hot Takes on international relations (like telling Palestinians that they "effed around and found out") kind of made his tech journalism irrelevant to some people

quoth @someone:

Maybe Gruber could have a game during his WWDC talk show where he would present to the Apple's SVPs some apps that have been rejected by Apple's politburo and ask them to: […]

As much as I'd deeply enjoy watching Apple SVPs twisting in the wind for a series of questions like that, that'd be the last Talk Show with Apple SVPs on it. While he's not under pressure (either from himself or from others) to spread outright lies like, say, Walter Duranty was, the best he can really do for something like that is lob slightly-stiffened softballs.

quoth @RS:

But it seems Apple can’t even spend the bare minimum of effort to reliably reject scam apps the same way that, oh, say, Sony or Nintendo do for game consoles.

I don't know about Sony, but IAP seems to be rare on the Switch. My hunch is that the Switch has less volume of scammers trying to get in, but I'm not sure how I'd find out if I'm wrong or not.

iDOS 3 has been finally approved!

Of all major emulators living in limbo or with bogus rejections I think only MAME4IOS remains!
https://www.reddit.com/r/EmulationOniOS/comments/1dsle2q/comment/lc99d1p/

Provenance is being rewritten in Swift, so I'm not counting that one as in rejection limbo.
https://x.com/provenanceapp/status/1823677283271381010