I've checked couple of popular apps on the App Store and here are my findings:<p>- Twitter: uses SFSafariViewController<p>- Reddit: uses custom in-app web view, shows page title and url on top, provides "open in Safari" option through share button<p>- Instagram: uses custom in-app web view, shows page title and url on top, provides the built in share-sheet, interestingly disabling open in Safari, but enabling "Add to Reading list"<p>Your current app on the App Store embeds third party content in an in-app web view, without showing the title or original URL on top and without being able to open the link in Safari.<p>I suggest you to either use SFSafariViewController for the third party content or mimic something similar with a proper title bar and and share button with Open in Safari option.
I think it's important to look at the broader issue:
"App stores" are walled gardens, policed by corporations and are the opposite of freedom.
The web is open and free.
We made a deal with the devil when we collectively decided to write and use apps and not the web.
This is just one symptom.
I had a very similar problem with an iOS app [1] I published which aggregated 3rd-party news content via RSS.<p>It took 3 months of back-and-forth with Apple Review to bypass those legality and content clauses in addition to a “limited functionality” clause. The key features introduced that finally put me past the review board were:<p>* Embedding a link to Safari on each news article cell<p>* Only allow content to display in SFSafariViewController (this was desired anyways)<p>* Allowing user to pick and choose categories of news to be shown<p>* A progress tracking feature which very simply measures and displays users’ time spent reading<p>The former two got me past the clauses identified in this article, re: 3rd party content. The latter two helped me to prove my app did something other than display 3rd party content (the limited functionality clause).<p>Was frustrating to find these workarounds, especially when the App Review board is not very responsive. Thankfully, some kind soul at Apple called me and helped me resolve everything within a day after my 5th consecutive reject.<p>[1] <a href="http://appstore.com/dossierallyouneedtoknow" rel="nofollow">http://appstore.com/dossierallyouneedtoknow</a>
This is a shame, I'm sorry to hear.<p>I loved this app for a long time because it was the only one (that I found) that would cache comment threads on the device - this meant I could read comments on the subway and/or without access to the internet.<p>A few months ago the app was rewritten in Swift and lost my most treasured feature, not that it matters anymore.<p>Thanks for the years of connectivity-anxiety free comment reading!<p>Edit: If you do get passed this (I really hope you do) please consider adding an option that would fetch and save comments on the device. I'll pay for it.
I see the comments are already filling up with the usual cries of how this is what you get when you play in a curated market, but something about this doesn't make sense.<p>Apple provides several views specifically designed to show web content: UIWebView, WKWebView, and SFSafariViewController. This ruling of theirs would apply to all uses of these views that aren't for specific domains and URLs known in advance, which makes no sense.<p>There are literally hundreds of thousands of apps across all kinds of categories that display websites within the app. I've personally launched dozens of apps that have this functionality and never received a rejection for it, or heard of anyone who has.<p>Moreover, there are no mechanisms that I'm even aware of to provide Apple with proof of "permission" to display a URL. So the path you're supposed to take is to wait for a rejection and then submit that proof to the reviewer in your resubmission? Or is this supposed to go in the review notes? Presumably you saying you have permission isn't enough, so what do they want, a link to a PDF of a signed contract that their legal team can review? Really doubt it.<p>None of this is meant to be defensive of Apple or an attack on the author of this article. It just sounds like there was a mistake or error in communication somewhere. I don't think Apple's intent here is to disallow any app that opens a URL, but I guess we'll see.
Why not launch Safari when the user clicks on an article? And make it clear that you have permission from HN to use their API?<p>Having used your app for exactly one minute, that seems like it would address their concerns and preserve usability.
It seems to me by saying "Attach documentary evidence in the App Review Information section in App Store Connect granting you permission to use these sources" they are just asking for a paper trail of your rights to use that information.<p>Why can't you include the agreement for the API as documentation of this? Seems really straight forward. They are trying to protect themselves, not get into a philosophical battle over software and media copyrights.
This seems weird enough to be an error of some kind. Not that Apple is likely to fix it, but enforcing this rule would exclude:<p>- All Reddit apps<p>- All HN apps<p>- Twitter<p>- Facebook<p>- Google News<p>- Any link or news aggregator<p>I guess even a browser wouldn't fly, since it "displays full articles from multiple news sources."
I think what bugs me most about app review is that these things <i>never</i> come up for 1.0 or even 1.15. It’s some minor update where <i>THEN</i> Apple complains about minutiae that have existed since 1.0. Heck, they once complained about not having a Minimize button in a window (literally all previous versions lacked it).
It's sad that most of the comments seem to suggest that while it is not ideal, this is indeed the rule and either the links should be opened in safari or this is nothing new. That such a common functionality isn't allowed on ios while showing arbitrary enforcement is a real travesty. I'm surprised how tepid most of the comments are.
Looks like Apple has a history of removing third party reader apps. See a discussion from a couple years ago on Reddit apps getting nuked: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/4edaee/looks_like_the_app_store_is_pulling_all_third/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/4edaee/looks_like_t...</a><p>edit: looks like that time it was for NSFW content....
Apple told you what to do:<p>> Require users to customize their news sources upon launching your app<p>Make it a setting. Anyone who is going to use your app is qualified to paste a URL into a text field (or click a radio button indicating they want to use news.yc vs old.xy)
There must be thousands and thousands of apps that function similar to HN clients. Providing a wrapper of an existing site and some additionally functionality seems pretty standard.<p>This is another sad example of the power the internet giants have over developers when we're forced to build for their platforms in order to get users.
What nonsense. The links that HN has are all to publicly available websites, isn't the whole reason for their existence to be visited? How is this different from a web browser?
> - Only show a portion of the article within your app and link out to Safari for the rest<p>Reading between the lines here, is the problem that ad tracking works less in these apps due to having separate cookies, so publishers are pressuring Apple to remove these apps?
Painful, but I guess it's up to the individual AppStore reviewer to figure out what is ok or not. I actually created a few years ago a HackerNews client as well for iOS, but it never got through the review process, not even version 1.0. I was surprised, since many other HackerNews apps with similar features were allowed. At that point I just gave up and put the source code on Github, for whole the world to see.<p>I believe this way it might still have helped me find new job opportunities, since companies could see a bit of my coding style. So I believe in the end not all work was for nothing.
I’m confused. What’s the violation here? Apps are supposed to open links in Safari “outside of the app” unless they have permission?<p>What about in-app browsers???? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram... they all open links inside their app, in an in-app browser.<p>Can somebody please clarify Apple’s rules here? (No snark please.)
This might be a good time to reconsider what made iOS the best platform for this application in the first place.<p>For example, can the app be re-packaged as an HTML5 app instead? What's the compelling advantage for building on iOS for this application?
> Questions like, “How is my app different than all the other Hacker News apps out there?” were ignored.<p>I understand the frustration that leads to this
question, but it is wholly irrelevant and only loses you a bit of the reviewer's attention span.
Are you displaying the articles in a standard Safari view like Tweetbot & co? And are you sure the problem isn't triggered by the favicons (aka copyrighted logos) on the main list?
“It felt like I was arguing with a robot.”<p>How much of the App Store review process is automated these days, anyways?<p>One of my largest laments for the last 8 years or so with the App Store is the lack of a phone number in the appeals process for applications. I feel speaking out loud with a real person would force answers to a lot of these questions, especially ‘why does ‘x’ get away with this and I can’t?’
Is the app actually parsing the articles and displaying them the app or just like other HN clients that just have links and you open them in Safari? If it's the first then I guess the complaint makes sense if you are implementing some kind of "Reader" mode in the app itself by scraping the content.
I'm sure this is an error, and a moronic one at that. Otherwise even safari infringes on Apple's rules.<p>The real maddening thing is that there is no appeal process and no (mainstream) way to distribute your app if Apple has a vague problem with it.<p>I hope for a day we will have mobile devices that are free and usable.
One has to wonder if what Apple actually objects to is the display of logos (from the favicons) in the list of links. They’re an incredibly brand conscious company and almost certain have people scouting for things that could get them sued by the owners of other brands.
Seems like a lot of these issues could be resolved with better communication, such as a call with a real person. The author mentions "It felt like I was arguing with a robot." Too many of these large companies (Google, Facebook, Apple) have become faceless.
One option is to submit the app under a new dev account with a few tweaked variables ( name, colors, screenshots ) I feel like some of these rejections depend on the reviewer you get that day; and once an app is flagged, it's hard to recover.
> 5.2.2 Third Party Sites/Services: If your app uses, accesses, monetizes access to, or displays content from a third party service, ensure that you are specifically permitted to do so under the service’s terms of use.<p>Interesting.. I had an app in the Apple App Store for some time that essentially scraped a service provider’s web site, allowing the user to invoke features of that site. Essentially wrapping an ugly web site in a pretty iOS interface. Never even considered “getting authorization” from them. It survived in the iOS App Store for a few years until I took it down for other reasons. Wonder how new this rule is or how evenly it’s enforced.
><i>Showing articles from random third party sources is pretty much THE feature of a Hacker News client app.</i><p>No, that should be showing the HN discussion.<p>For the articles itself, you could always forward an open the original page in an embedded webkit view.
A lesson learned by a lot of iOS devs. If you want to play in their game, you have to play by their rules, even if they don't apply those rules to everyone else.
>* Questions like, “How is my app different than all the other Hacker News apps out there?” were ignored. (...) It makes you wonder: if this rule is supposed to be enforced by app review, how does ANY Hacker News client make it through app review?*<p>That's not a very good question to argue with Apple about. It's like saying the traffic cop "but there are all those other cares going beyond 70 mph, why stop me?".
Apple is a monopoly in the apps market, controlling 66% [1] of the $70B annually. It's practices are now going to be litigated at the supreme court level [2]<p>Apple's only defense, that it isn't a majority of the unit sales in Mobile phones, is a convenient strawman distracting from the fact that they ARE a majority in the app store market. Increasingly, people are finding such excuses misleading and outdated [3]<p>I hope Apple losses in the supreme court, as their app store process makes a mockery of an individual's ownership of the iPhone they paid for. Imagine if you bought a house, and the builder got to decide what furniture could and couldn't be put in it.<p>Additionally, it's time for the EU and FTC to regulate Apple and the like, on realistic definitions of monopoly and antitrust<p>[1]: <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/16/apples-app-store-revenue-nearly-double-that-of-google-play-in-first-half-of-2018/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/16/apples-app-store-revenue-n...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/20/17479480/supreme-court-apple-vs-pepper-antitrust-lawsuit-standing-explainer" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/20/17479480/supreme-court-ap...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://qz.com/work/1460402/google-facebook-and-amazon-benefit-from-an-outdated-definition-of-monopoly/" rel="nofollow">https://qz.com/work/1460402/google-facebook-and-amazon-benef...</a>
There are a lot of complaints about "X app does this, why can't mine." The app store isn't a democracy, they can and do make up their own rules and they can apply them how they want.<p>Think of the Simpsons episode and the "No Homer's Club". They can allow one Homer, and reject all other Homers if they want.
The time has come: OEM's that lock their users into a specific app distribution platform need to be slapped with an anti-trust lawsuit. Hard.<p>When you have Apple's market share... well, with great power comes great responsibility....
If displaying links to other websites violates the TOS, then iOS is completely broken.<p>Whatever they are selling their customers is no longer the internet. It is a weird, hyper-monetized digital playpen.
Enough HN pwa to test <a href="https://hnpwa.com" rel="nofollow">https://hnpwa.com</a>. Afcourse Apple is not fully embracing Pwa like Chrome/Google
I am curious if that kind of arbitrary myopic judgement will hurt Apple in the long term, as influential developers end up using Android because it supports more options.
I just wrote up a long response to this rather than in comment form:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442147" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442147</a><p>The main issue is - don't be a sharecropper. The problem is that many people can't avoid it and get sucked in regardless.
> As for their alternatives, kicking the user out to Safari would significantly reduce the usability of the app.<p>Not at all.<p>When you open a website in Safari from an app, the user gets a first class website-browser experience without your chrome, and a "< Back to your app" button in the menuline.
>kicking the user out to Safari would significantly reduce the usability of the app<p>Am I the only one who HATES when apps open links inside a webview and you have to tap yet another button to open the link in Safari? Most apps do that and they annoy the hell out of me.
Sounds like their problem is that you don't have permission from Hacker News to launch a Hacker News app? To be honest, this is a good policy - the app store is inundated with shitty apps that capitalize on well known properties in this way and monetize their users with ads for even shittier apps, with straight up scams being the plankton on which this ecosystem depends.