This is why you should read the App review guidelines [1] before you start. It's right there in black and white:<p><i>12.1 Apps that scrape any information from Apple sites (for example from apple.com, iTunes Store, App Store, iTunes Connect, Apple Developer Programs, etc.) or create rankings using content from Apple sites and services will be rejected</i><p>[1] <a href="https://developer.apple.com/appstore/guidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/appstore/guidelines.html</a>
Nice! I've been thinking, if there were more open-source apps for iOS, then the developer account could become the new (albeit pricey) jailbreak.<p>Maybe someone could even build a nice installer or wrapper around Xcode so that non-technical people can install such apps (and pretend to the phone they were developing them).<p>(Disclaimer: I'm more familiar with Android than with iOS development, don't know for sure this would work)
"I'm a software engineer @ Microsoft's cloud computing service, Windows Azure."<p>Props to Ahmet for being open about building products and using tools from competitors rather than denying they exist.
I feel like Apple's rejection of this app / DMCA shutdown of apple-tracker supports its brilliantly annoying marketing - scarcity creates mystery. The fact that you might not be able to get it makes you want it more; not knowing what iPhones they have in stock adds a weird level of excitement to the process of purchasing one.<p>Apple could make this app in a second, but they don't because they want you to wonder, they want you to fret, and they want to make it that much more satisfying when you actually get it.
This is why HN should also display subdomains in submissions. This is a blog of a random guy, which redirects to another domain, but gets most of the attention because of heroku.com at the end. There are many apps being rejected by Apple each day because of violating their ToS, and I fail to see why this story would be more relevant than others.
Have you tried writing your own very thin wrapper for scraping Apple instead of doing it directly inside of the actual application?<p>I like the app... It's clean and simple. I had this problem the other night. I wanted to see stock of phones and unless you begin the process of upgrading your line, you can't do that on mobile.<p>Anyway, seems like there might be a creative solution here if you run your own lightweight proxy-like API so that on the surface it appears like you're not scraping Apple. It also opens the door for repeating the experience of your native app as a mobile friendly website.
Although it's not much of a use for me since I'm not in the U.S., looks nice, polished, dead-simple. Ability to open store locations in Google Maps (in addition to stock Maps.app) and remembering last chosen items are nice features too. Too bad Apple is not very open to this kind of things.<p>By the way, does Apple's official Apple Store application has this feature?
On a related note, Apple also sent a DMCA take down notice to a site which did something similar for iPhone 5S availability:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6680716" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6680716</a><p>Site in question:
<a href="http://www.apple-tracker.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.apple-tracker.com</a>
Nice app. It reminds me of <a href="http://www.refurb.me" rel="nofollow">http://www.refurb.me</a>, which is to track the stock of refurbished Apple devices.