Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

And Apple is not even an isolated case.<p>Google will close gmail accounts, take away adsense revenues, or remove youtube videos on a whim.<p>Visa blocked users from giving their money to political causes they decided didn&#x27;t aligned with their view of the world.<p>For years Microsoft made it super hard to buy hardware without paying the Windows licence. They killed xbox remotely. They have invasive telemetry in Win 10.<p>Paypal may refuse to pay the money you have on their account at any moment. Your money, no appeal.<p>Twitter and facebook censorship rules are on a case by case basis. If your famous, you may be able to use hate speech. I you are an anonymous political activist, China may ask for your shut down.<p>Big companies exist to make money. If they get too much power, they will abuse it. Not because they are evil, but because it&#x27;s the logical thing to do for them.<p>This is why I was advocating in another comment that we should not use WhatsApp new payment system:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23553455" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23553455</a><p>Thinking about the power we give to big entities is a central mechanism to build the society we live on. That&#x27;s why we should think about what we buy, the media we consumme, etc.<p>They are votes, just as much as during an election.

This kind of post infuriates me. As an iOS developer for 10 years, i can guarantee you that there are probably hundreds (if not thousands) of stories like that, with people getting shut down for no good reason, and having their business killed.<p>It&#x27;s now so bad people are refraining from trying out innovative business model or apps just because they think there could be a chance someone at apple validation wouldn&#x27;t like it and kill the product at any time.<p>I wish the Hey story makes people realize it is not reasonable to have one actor control the only software distribution channel to hundred of millions of customers.<p>I&#x27;m fine with apple wanting to provide a highly curated experience to their users by having them download apps from a store they control. But this shouldn&#x27;t be the <i>only</i> option.

I keep reading these comments on HN of people trying to guess on what the reason is Apple, Google or who else is terminating accounts, apps, videos or monetizing opportunities. Usually accompanied by a tone of voice telling people they should have known better. The point is: Your guess is as good as mine.<p>The fact is that those companies are not telling people what they did wrong and even more persuasive these days not explaining why their apparent transgression is leading to a particular punishment. Or how that transgression fits the punishment. I for one will not subject myself to such a form of tyranny.<p>In this case even if having your app in TestFlight too long, why is now (3 years in) the time to revoke the app? Having 200 test users is too much. Why not tell people beforehand they exceeded a limit if that is your rule?<p>Lets say you are invited into a country as a citizen, but the conditions are: You can be punished arbitrarily, even banished, without recourse, harassed, given arbitrary commands by minions. You pay a 30% tax on all your proceeds, but your proceeds are your sole responsibility. There is no right to have your grievances addressed by the tyrant, not even by one of the lower minions. Would you go? I will not. Now say you already find yourself in such a country. I&#x27;m sorry for you. I think I would organize and try to collectively have those rights improved.

&gt; The big problem is that when Apple tells you that the reasons “are not limited” the ones they listed, it could be anything. They could call my face ugly and remove me from the Developer Program under that reason and tell me it was because of “fraud”.<p>&lt;rant&gt;<p>Seriously, just how hard is it for these companies to communicate properly? Would it kill them to send something like &quot;We saw X on your account so we are closing your account temporarily. Contact us.&quot;. Instead it is just &quot;We closed your account. Get screwed.&quot;.<p>This is why so many developers are going the web app way these days. Dealing with a closed platform who won&#x27;t even talk to you is just infuriating.<p>Sorry for the rant.

I can only speak for myself, but I have had a number of interactions with the review team, and I have <i>always</i> ended up communicating with a human; although they would often paste “talking points” into their replies.<p>Because of the nature of a couple of my apps, I’ve had them bounced for “providing commonly available services” (i.e. competing with OS tools). In each instance, I have appealed, citing some unique features, and have prevailed.<p>I think that reviewers have a number of “1-button” responses, provided by some kind of dashboard, in order to ensure a narrative is maintained. This is actually common for many customer interaction scenarios. I don’t like it, but understand why it happens.<p>I’ll bet that the more heated an exchange gets, the more “canned” these responses become, because...lawyers. He may, in fact, be communicating with a human, who keeps hitting canned response buttons (not much different from ‘bots).<p>I’ve wondered whether or not folks might use TestFlight for “shadow release.” I have seen app makers use Enterprise in that fashion. I have no idea (or opinion) on whether or not that was the case, here.<p>I’m not sure I would want to pursue my case in the court of public opinion. It’s a risky gambit, but this chap may feel he has nothing to lose.<p><i>EDIT: One thing that I should mention, is that I never have a release in TestFlight for more than a few days. It has a &quot;time bomb&quot;; I think, maybe 60 or 90 days. That means, in order to maintain an app in TF for three years, he&#x27;d need to keep re-releasing every couple of months. That speaks to some kind of intent.</i>

TestFlight has its limitations, unfortunately. It is not a distribution platform, it is not intended to be active for longer than 90 days without updates and should not be monetized<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;app-store&#x2F;review&#x2F;guidelines&#x2F;#beta-testing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;app-store&#x2F;review&#x2F;guidelines&#x2F;#bet...</a><p>I encourage you to read through the entire AppStore guidelines, there might be more sections that apply to Apple&#x27;s decision to terminate the account<p>I didn&#x27;t read through all of your privacy policy on the app&#x27;s website, but definitely worthwhile to cross check it with the AppStore guidelines as well.

For someone who’s considering getting into Apple Developer program: should Apple Developer account be separate from primary Apple ID used across devices?<p>And if not, and a single Apple ID is also used for development, (1) can it remain intentionally unassociated with any payment method in any specific country, and (2) is there a threat of losing it if Developer account is terminated for some unfathomable reason?

An interesting spin of the story would be if Apple announced an intel to arm migration kit called &quot;Mignori&quot; next week at WWDC...

I really hate this current reality of having to use social media channels for a chance of proper customer support. Are there any initiatives that are working against this? I would be happy to contribute to any kind of platform or movement or whatever that aims to mitigate&#x2F;fix this.

Apple’s decisions in the last 5 years are causing more and more of my developer friends to move away. Bringing back the escape key on the MacBook Pro won’t change that.<p>If Apple were not years behind PWA integration, switching to a PWA instead of native app might be an option. But this is sadly not in Apple’s interest.<p>I wonder how many people will choose Android over Apple in the future because of PWAs. I can imagine there will be a flood of useful PWAs, freely to use and only fully working on Android, not Apple.

At this point I am hopeful (but not optimistic) that the EU competition&#x2F;antitrust investigation [1] might go somewhere and get an outcome. The trouble with investigations like these, as we all know from previous cases, is they tend to drag on rather than yield rapid outcomes.<p>In this case, it seems we&#x27;ve sleepwalked into a situation where there are conflicts of interest like never really seen before - companies with global scale, able to arbitrarily decide which competition they wish to allow to be present on &quot;their&quot; marketplace, and make them either raise their price by 30%, or be 30% less profitable.<p>Resolving these conflicts, and recognising these aren&#x27;t simple &quot;creation of a moat&quot;, but rather some actual, tangible, anti-competitive practices would be a good starting point. But what is the outcome? Apple&#x27;s view is &quot;we&#x27;re protecting users from bad things on the internet&quot;, but perhaps this kind of arbitrary decision-making is not one to be getting made arbitrarily?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ec.europa.eu&#x2F;commission&#x2F;presscorner&#x2F;detail&#x2F;en&#x2F;ip_20_1073" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ec.europa.eu&#x2F;commission&#x2F;presscorner&#x2F;detail&#x2F;en&#x2F;ip_20_...</a>

&quot;In the last few days, Next Anime Episode has started to receive an unusual number of 1-Star reviews and all in a quick sucession, so I am starting to think that someone is targetting me for god knows what reason&quot;<p>Speculation but my money would be on some unethical competitor or even just a jerk who doesn&#x27;t like Andy is spamming negative reviews and reported him to Apple for fraud. Since I&#x27;ve never heard of this happening, I don&#x27;t know if Apple&#x27;s fraud department takes a guilty-until-innocent approach or if they agreed fraud occurred. Either way the lack of transparency and communication is not right. I&#x27;ll echo sentiments that I&#x27;ve spoken to humans about app issues but never about fraud.

&gt; <i>I know of developers who were instantly terminated and all their apps removed. Luckily this has not happened to me.</i><p>Well there you have it. The rest of devs will be happy they&#x27;re still under Apple&#x27;s wing, and nothing will change.

The problem with all these &quot;Apple is being nasty to me&quot; stories that have been appearing recently is that there appears to be a strong smell of &quot;two sides to every story&quot;.<p>I have not read the blog post above fully, but a speed-read suggests that the author was publicly distributing an app through TestFlight rather than App Store.<p>I am not accusing anyone of anything here. But <i>if</i> my speed-read is accurate, then its not at all surprising Apple have taken issue with him.<p>TestFlight is a dev tool. Its not for production deployment. Its meant for beta testing.

The consequence of playing in a walled garden.<p>Is there still no way to release an iPhone app out with the iOS app store?

From what I understand, in the free market system we consider things to be anti-competitive, anti-consumer, etc. when a corporation has some kind of market dominance acquired through earning the trust of consumers, and once they have obtained that trust, they abuse it by imposing a set of self-serving conditions on the market which serves their own interest in some way at the cost of some other player in the market - either consumer or competitor or someone else.<p>To enable this countries and regions have drafted laws to govern what business and trade practices are permissible.<p>Some non-rhetorical questions out of curiosity because I genuinely don&#x27;t know:<p>Is it illegal for supermarkets to only partner with certain brands and carry their products over those of their competitors? If there is only 1 Walmart within driving distance of 50,000 people, and that Wal-Mart chooses to throw out all toilet paper brands and sell their store brand, is this allowed under current law? What if they allow the brand to stay if they pay an additional whimsical commission to Wal-Mart? Is that legal?<p>Is there something that makes the App store different from the physical store equivalent?<p>Putting aside the letter of the law, does it violate the aforementioned &quot;spirit&quot; of the law? i.e. ought there be laws against this kind of behaviour? I am sure there are good arguments for both sides.

The article doesn&#x27;t pass the smell test to me.<p>By his own description of what it does, I&#x27;d say the app is highly likely to be selling access to content that the author hasn&#x27;t licensed, and is on sketchy copyright grounds.<p>Also, the fact that a vote manipulation app...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;2&#x2F;4&#x2F;21122737&#x2F;iowa-democractic-caucus-voting-app-android-testfairy-screenshots-app-store" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;2&#x2F;4&#x2F;21122737&#x2F;iowa-democractic-...</a><p>...was distributed via a test platform with the financial backing of former Clinton and Obama &#x2F; recent Pete Buttigieg staffers...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apnews.com&#x2F;5232ce5601996c1de440806ad30fa4fb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apnews.com&#x2F;5232ce5601996c1de440806ad30fa4fb</a><p>...has likely put Apple in the position of being compelled to more actively police what goes on in test apps. I get the knee-jerk tendency to blame corporate oppression of indie developers since that is usually what we see from the Googles and Microsofts of the world, but Apple has little monetary interest in kicking a successful app developer off of their ecosystem, unless that app developer is blatantly flaunting civil &#x2F; criminal statutes or trying to scam Apple out of their cut of the profit.<p>If I had a to guess I&#x27;d say this guy is doing both.

You get the same thing with YouTube creators (plus they get bogus or spurious copyright flags with the same result). If we&#x27;re going to have these big platforms (and I&#x27;d include Steam, Amazon, YouTube etc) then we need to have legislation giving their clients basic, non-waivable rights to a quick and independent review and reasonable treatment. Sadly the law seems to be headed in the opposite direction (requiring platforms to do more &quot;moderation&quot;).

`While the first version of this app was on the App Store from 2014 to 2016, I removed it in that last year because the app stopped working properly with most Boorus, and it was broken for most users. Since then, I started developing a new version called “Mignori 3”, which has never hit the App Store. It has been on TestFlight for a while.`<p>So basically he was calling something a &#x27;beta&#x27; and distributing it through Testflight for 3 years.<p>Yep, no clear reason here. Big Apple bad!<p>Apple has a lot of problems, and I agree, but most of these &#x27;developer stories about mean Apple&#x27; always have two sides of the story. I remember the same outrage about Kapeli&#x27;s Dash situation, and then came out an account in his name was doing fraudulent activities ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12680131" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12680131</a> )

Might be that they just don’t like the idea of image board browser. Apple is somewhat strict on what kind of content the apps are providing to user (See ”Objectionable Content” [1])<p>Techically this is of course just like web browser, but Apple could see it differently.<p>[1] Objectionable Content

Where are the people arguing that it’s fine because private companies can do whatever they want?

&gt; All the skills I have built over the course of almost a decade are obsolete now, because I do not imagine myself working for other people as an iOS dev without having my own hobby iOS apps on the App Store. It feels like all the blogging I have been doing has been a waste because I cannot participate in the knowledge I myself write, and it’s pointless to engage in the knowledge of others if I cannot try what they write.<p>The fact that a faceless entity can lock you out of developing like this is just wrong. I fear for the future of such closed off ecosystems.

Oh FFS, well, up to the top you go. Maybe someone at Apple will see this and poke their friends in App Store Review or something.<p>We really shouldn’t have to do that kind of shit.

Startup idea for anyone who is interested:<p>Paid customer service where the customer pays money (say $100-$1k depending on how serious the issue is) and each company can have a special channel to respond to these paid requests and be compensated (say 80% of the fee the customer pays). That way companies will have the will and ability to attend to serious issues and filter them out from the &quot;useless&quot; customer requests that flood any large size business.

Irony. You can publish a book without a publisher right now. But you have to rely on publisher will if you want to publish an app.

We need third party app stores and there should be a section on the Apple App Store dedicated for installing these.

I once had Apple reject an iOS app update citing IP violations because we had an in-app settings page using a stock UITableViewController with default UITableViewCells with UISwitch in the accessory view (on the right) and vanilla text. Literally no styling.<p>Apparently it looked too much like the iPad Settings app.<p>Insane.

That&#x27;s why I often don&#x27;t bother with Apple. If it doesn&#x27;t work on OSX or iOS, too bad. People have to learn that Apple is not good for them or for society and I&#x27;m happy to make my products unavailable to Apple users to help them to learn that valuable life lesson.<p>Just find an alternative business strategy that doesn&#x27;t rely on Apple. You can&#x27;t rely on them. They don&#x27;t give a crap about developers and never have. Why do all developers keep enabling them? Seriously, just sacrifice a small % of your income by ignoring Apple and you will help make the world a better place. Developers have to stand up for themselves.

I specifically opened HN just now to see if there were any negative posts about Apple, given that WWDC is in a few days, and like clockwork, there it is.

here&#x27;s my thought on the &quot;raging&quot; debate -- what if, just what if, we are free to set up &quot;stores&quot; where our computing devices can connect to without liability and with the same level of complexity as with the default one being offered up? walled gardens create opportunities for abuse, which, unfortunately for us hapless developers, impose yet another level of bureaucracy.

We do need legislation here.<p>I would suggest requiring cause to be stated for account termination or threatened termination, and a formal right of appeal to request evidence.<p>Of course this would be onerous for the smallest businesses, so we’d need some threshold for when it kicks in. E.g. 2 years, or $1,000 of transactions.<p>This wouldn’t make any particular kind of termination illegal. It would simply force transparency, so that then if there really are abuses or patterns of abuse taking place, we can expose them.<p>It would also apply to all businesses - Google, Banks, Gyms, whatever.

Had a horror experience with PayPal. Lost tons of cash. Getting paid became incredibly difficult.

where is this ? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;13&#x2F;tech&#x2F;apple-app-store-supreme-court&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;13&#x2F;tech&#x2F;apple-app-store-supreme-...</a>

Please build progressive web apps.<p>There&#x27;s not much they can&#x27;t do, now.

Have I misunderstood something, or is this app&#x27;s main goal to view Japanese comics infringing copyright in some way? That&#x27;s probably the reason it was pulled. Sure it has other uses, plausible deniability, but what did the guy expect?

This title could really benefit from some punctuation.

If you need an online SaaS account, that can be remotely disabled, to develop and distribute your software, you have been already lost anyway.<p>Forget that useless malicious platform already. It&#x27;s not worth it.

What is the revenue potential of app store apps? Any studies or surveys on the matter?

Impudent code serf thinks he&#x27;s owed reasoning by his corporate lord.

govt&#x27;s need to catch up and start setting some rules. App stores have gotten so large that they essentially become like real estate or store space. You can&#x27;t just have a few stores control all the means of distribution.

&gt; Mignori is a client for Image Board websites (we informally call “Boorus”). These image boards are popular in the anime community, although there can be image boards for anything you can think of.<p>I just googled this, found some references to the anime image boards. Most were Hentai &#x2F; Porn. If the main purpose of an app is viewing adult content, its main purpose is viewing adult content - even if you have to add the ressources yourself. (I might be wrong, I don&#x27;t have a clue about the Boorus community).<p>So prop. Apples &quot;Freedom from Porn&quot;approach?