About iSH’s pending removal from the App Store

This isn’t sustainable.<p>Software developers can’t build on a foundation that is constantly, capriciously shifting. This on top of the App Store&#x27;s already-onerous restrictions and the fact that it’s the only practical way to get your software on one of the world&#x27;s largest computing platforms has already engendered a deep antipathy [1] among Apple developers, and there are no signs it’s getting better. Something has to give.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23580762" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23580762</a>

Hi, Saagar from the iSH team here. We received a call from someone who runs App Review at Apple earlier this evening. They apologized for our review experience, telling us that they&#x27;ve accepted our appeal and that they will not be removing iSH from sale tomorrow. We&#x27;ll work out the details with them in the coming days.<p>A huge thanks to all of you for your support of iSH!

Apple clearly does not want you to have a general-purpose computer:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boingboing.net&#x2F;2012&#x2F;01&#x2F;10&#x2F;lockdown.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boingboing.net&#x2F;2012&#x2F;01&#x2F;10&#x2F;lockdown.html</a><p>Everything is done with &quot;security&quot; as an excuse because it&#x27;s hard to argue against[1], but I think people are slowly starting to see through that. Apple wants to control every aspect of your life, and if you let it, it will. I wonder whether those who work at Apple and are responsible for doing such things really understand the implications, and whether they agree with it...<p>[1] Except with that classic Franklin quote.

As beautiful and polished as iOS is it is policies like these that keep me on Android.<p>I wish iSH the best of luck, but I will stick with Termux (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;termux.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;termux.com&#x2F;</a>) on Android for now.

Apple: the iPad Pro is a computer<p>Also Apple: how dare you make a sandboxed shell environment for it

These are linked in the post, but I&#x27;m pulling them out as a top-level comment so you can focus your discussion on those.<p>Theodore on how the App Review process could be improved: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tbodt.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;08&#x2F;app-review-experiences.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tbodt.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;08&#x2F;app-review-experiences.html</a><p>Ramblings I wrote on why I believe the guideline iSH was pulled under was incorrectly applied and needs to be rewritten: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;saagarjha.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;08&#x2F;fixing-section-2-5-2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;saagarjha.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;08&#x2F;fixing-section-2-5-2&#x2F;</a><p>Related, a-Shell got a similar notice: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;a_shell_ios&#x2F;status&#x2F;1325526061099196416" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;a_shell_ios&#x2F;status&#x2F;1325526061099196416</a>

Yet another example of apple&#x27;s ongoing control freakery. I wonder how many incidents will be required before those who rush to defend them every time get it?<p>Apple tolerate app store developers as a necessary evil. If they could develop all of their own apps they would.<p>As with suppliers, as with stores, as with everything they would gladly prefer to do it all themselves and give zero access or share the slightest collaboration with anybody.<p>They are utterly ruthless in this regard and will continue to be for as long as they exist. This includes doing bad and nasty things as well as those the apologists can more readily rationalise.<p>I am a little surprised anybody takes risks in this arena. Of course for $$$ apps that trivially fulfil apple&#x27;s arbitrary rules (for now) the potential payout justifies it but for free&#x2F;open source apps why risk the pain?<p>For a company that happily generates colossal margins by using the effectively slave labour of a totalitarian state which puts people in concentration camps and disappears political opponents them being unethical&#x2F;inconsistent in the app store seems very unsurprising. Even in western countries they happily bankrupt suppliers after poaching all their staff. Yet there appears to be shock when they do things considerably less evil... Strange to me.

&gt; Soon after we released iSH without apk, we found users who had figured out a way to get apk back using wget and were posting about this throughout the internet. We suspect this was the reason why our rejection notice mentioned wget specifically<p>As the writer of one of the links in that sentence, I almost feel bad for making the post I did. Almost. If I hadn&#x27;t someone else would have, clearly. I&#x27;m not some super hacker that discovered a hidden backdoor here.<p>It&#x27;s frustrating, to say the least, that Apple won&#x27;t let me do what I want with hardware I own. Yep, I know it&#x27;s a long standing issue, and I&#x27;m not the first one to have this gripe, but this sort of nonsense is why I&#x27;m moving away from the Apple ecosystem. Once you piss off your power users, I wonder if the ecosystem will survive for long.<p>Then again, maybe I&#x27;m just having a &quot;get off my lawn&quot; moment, and Apple is on the right path. I&#x27;m not clairvoyant, I just want to have a nice Mosh client that can run a Python script to find an IP and open a firewall hole. But nope, that&#x27;s evil scripting, I guess.

This is one thing that I hate the most about IOS. I like the polished look and the usability. To be completely honest, I don&#x27;t need to have a shell running on my phone. I&#x27;m not going to write a shell script to automate anything on the tiny screen of my iPhone 8. iSh is an emulator anyway! But, like many other curious users, I don&#x27;t want to lose the ability to do it. Especially when the hardware is a lot more capable that what the OS supports. I understand that Apple does it for &quot;security&quot; purposes!! They should at least enable this on iPad OS. May be warn the users about the &quot;perils&quot; of &quot;foreign code&#x27;! I&#x27;ve been using iSH since the TestFlight days. I played around and downloaded packages. Even downloaded Perl! Now that&#x27;s gone. I can sideload it using Xcode, but not everyone has a Mac to do it.

PSA: You don&#x27;t actually own your i* devices. You did pay for them but someone else controls them and determines what you get to run on them.

&gt;The nature of iSH meant that this problem was fundamental, as users can always add back functionality that we remove.<p>That&#x27;s the point, isn&#x27;t it? When I had an iphone, I always understood that there are no local terminal apps because apple banned them. They shifted the rules slightly since then to make it easier to make apps for teaching programming, but the goal was never to make generic dev environments. When I heard about this app, I assumed there had been a fairly fundamental change in the sorts of apps apple allowed. It seems like no such change occurred - apple just didn&#x27;t notice what the app was doing until after it was released.<p>Good on the iSH people for giving it a shot. I doubt they&#x27;ll break through the apple wall, but there&#x27;s always a chance.

Don’t build software for Apple devices. It’s a pretty straightforward solution.<p>Apple has shown time and again that they’ll crush your project&#x2F;business in an instant without recourse or a second thought.<p>Nothing on the App Store, regardless of whether it complies with Apple’s policies currently or not, has any guarantee it won’t be disappeared tomorrow for non-compliance when the wind blows in a different direction (like any number of parental control apps prior to Screen Time).

This year I build qoob, an app to interact with an IOT electric scooter parking. In August I had the MVP ready, we build 2 prototypes and could save and charge scooters of all voltages in office halls.<p>The project is not my main job, so time is precious.<p>I was asked to create a new functionality: Allow companies to buy and borrow e-scooters between company employees.<p>But what happened is that I had to implement Apple Login, since FB and Google did work already.<p>Who should I take care off? Apple or the customer&#x2F;users? Is it optimal to prioritize the Apple Login, that nobody requested?<p>I don&#x27;t care about monopoly persse, I&#x27;m concerned because it doesn&#x27;t let me be user-centric, consumer-centric.<p>(and I can&#x27;t leave apple, because I can&#x27;t leave my users)

I have a feeling they are going to release something on Tuesday. They just gave the same notice to a-shell too to remove `pip`, `wasm`, and `curl`.

Anti-trust action against Apple and Google for holding the mobile app distribution market hostage for more than a decade cannot come fast enough.

One can tell apple that any application that shows web pages essentially remotely executing code on their device.

There are at least two reasons that Apple tries to prevent tools like iSH. In order of what I suspect is their motivation:<p>1. Users can be foolish or even tricked into installing apps and entering commands. If iSH provided a possible attack vector, these kinds of users would get bitten (and they would complain about weak Apple security). As Apple really does seem to be making a strong effort on security (and privacy, it appears?), losing a few useful apps and a few users is worth the trade.<p>2. This is a bit more of a stretch, but for various reasons Apple wants to control the macos&#x2F;ios development process. Whether it&#x27;s to force developers to own Mac computers (when xcode could probably run quite well on iPad Pro...), or to perhaps guarantee a more consistent outcome (which ultimately should affect the users in a positive way, or at least a less negative way), Apple wants to control the process.

I will say it again. The one thing Apple will try to defend is the concept of an app&#x2F;container. I wrote a similar comment supporting their actions with video game streaming platforms the other day[1]. Any app that creates some kind of a wedge into another kind of app&#x2F;container ecosystem is not going to fly. I do believe this will get solved by having a store within a store model. It just means all the packages&#x2F;apps that are run from within the other platform will need to have some kind of listing&#x2F;metadata shared and controllable in some fashion by Apple. The interesting thing will be the relationship with devs. Does Apple need to have a direct one or not?<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25022746" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25022746</a>

&quot;we received a call from Apple&quot;<p>is this a literal statement where some human from Apple called on the telephone to speak to someone about this situation, or is this a phrase that actually means they received an email notification about the situation? I ask because it seems well outside the norm of no-human contact regarding support from FAANG companies.

If I was iSH developer and I wanted to fuck with Apple I would make iSH run in WASM and browser. Good luck banning that desktop shortcut.

Cant imagine how Apple would let this through in the first place but makes sense they would pull it.<p>I grabbed a copy after reading this and very nice work by the developers but easy to see how an app that lets me install other apps on ios would be banned.

To me it appears they admit that iSH allows scripting (ummm, obviously), and that scripting is against Apple’s policy (as we all know). From one of their articles: “Soon after we released iSH without apk, we found users who had figured out a way to get apk back using wget and were posting about this throughout the internet”.<p>They argue that Apple’s policy should be changed to allow scripting: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;saagarjha.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;08&#x2F;fixing-section-2-5-2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;saagarjha.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;08&#x2F;fixing-section-2-5-2&#x2F;</a><p>It looks to me that Apple’s main reason for not allowing scripting is to prevent an app from deploying other apps within itself (preventing any competition with the app store), with a secondary reason being security for users (harder to argue against).<p>I can’t see Apple ever allowing a shell app into the store, as that would turn your iDevice into a general purpose computer.

Apple is walking a fine line here.<p>I understand on one hand Apple wants to prevent Epic from installing their own competing app store on iOS, and they also probably don&#x27;t want to be sued by Nintendo for hosting emulators (even if emulators are probably legal.) It&#x27;s pretty obvious that a) it&#x27;s Apple&#x27;s walled garden so they can mostly do what they want, b) the vast majority of iOS apps are games and c) other game platforms are similarly restrictive.<p>On the other hand, Apple probably doesn&#x27;t want to kill Scriptable or Pythonista (and I don&#x27;t want them to either.) One of the nicest features of iOS (and macOS) is that you can use scripting apps and languages to construct workflows that use multiple apps, access the internet, etc.. Scriptable and Pythonista are also useful as personal programming and learning platforms.<p>Good luck I guess.

Previous discussion of app: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24861923" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24861923</a>

How does Apple expect the iPad to replace personal computers when it sabotages attempts to bring powerful dev tools to iOS again and again?

Update from tbodt on the iSH Discord:<p><i>@everyone We got a call this evening from someone who runs App Review. They apologized for the experience we had, then told us they&#x27;ve accepted our appeal and won&#x27;t be removing iSH from the store tomorrow. We&#x27;ll stay in contact with them to work out details. Thanks everyone for your support!</i>

I&#x27;ve been following iSH for a while and was very happy when it finally came out of beta. iOS needs a good shell and iSH seemed perfect. I actually thought this will fit into apple&#x27;s strategy of marketing ipad as a replacement for Laptop

iSH is awesome. I&#x27;ve been using the beta for about a year (or more) and have provided some feedback to Theodore a few times. This eventuality was almost certain because of the App Store restrictions that have been in place since before the iSH project was launched. In this way, Apple sucks. They have complete control over what an app can and cannot do. There is no alternative (besides jailbreaking) to the Apple App Store for iOS apps. This is part of the deal that you should know about when you buy an iOS product.

&gt; Advanced users are welcome to build iSH themselves—it’s free and open source and always will be!<p>I mean, the app store fiasco sucks, but at the same time if you&#x27;re advanced enough to want a command line on an iDevice you&#x27;re probably advanced enough to do &#x27;git clone&#x27;, hit the build button in XCode, and do a local install. It&#x27;s grade school level of difficulty.<p>Ideally they&#x27;d offer a release that you can build and install locally that&#x27;s full featured and is wholly unfettered by concerns about app store policies.

Is Apple really expecting developers to port their tools to the arm macs with their iOS policies (that I’m sure they are salivating to establish for macOS).<p>Good luck to them and their iOS developer minions.

&gt; Precompiled builds of iSH (distributed as IPA files) will remain available [...] for jailbroken users.<p>Is there any reason to use iSH over the native system shell when jailbroken?

I’ve been all in on Apple for about 15 years, but have been slowly moving away as it gets harder to use their products for development and power usage.<p>Got a windows laptop recently, and the developer experience is much better than Mac OS which surprised me. Thinking about getting a surface pro to replace my iPad for traveling.<p>Edit: the only thing that keeps me on the iPhone right now is that their hardware (chips in particular) are so much better.

There is no point fighting Apple. Companies spend resources on Apple moving goal posts and focus on artificial problems. Once companies stop supporting Apple products, users will switch to better platforms or Apple will change their ways. I made sure everyone I know is informed about Apple shady practices and knows to avoid their products.

Grabbing my popcorn to watch as the apple sympathizing crowd comes up with more excuses

#unpopularopinion: If someone wants an Android experience they should buy an Android phone where iSH functionality is basically built it. iSH is cool, but they were skirting the rules and everyone knows it. This isn’t shocking, and there were bound to be hiccups on the fringes of the rules like this.<p>If you want a phone for just getting the normal stuff done in a curated world, then pick iOS as that’s what they are trying to do. If you want a phone&#x2F;device that is wide open to play with, extend, and hack on in a basically open manner, then pick Android as that’s what they are trying to do.<p>What seems like a waste of time is to pick one side and then complain about it not being enough like the other side. Pick your flavor, the world offers both. And then quit whining if the other side is more successful by some metric... Make your chosen side better or switch.

I don&#x27;t understand how this was permitted in the first place. Everything about this is against the app store guidelines. Unfortunately I don&#x27;t see how you can have this be compliant at all.

&gt; Consistent enforcement of Apple’s incorrect interpretation would require the removal of all scripting apps, including many of the most popular applications in the App Store and some of Apple’s own applications.<p>The problem with &quot;consistent enforcement&quot; is<p>1) the guidelines are purposefully vague<p>2) there are reports of unwritten internal rules that are different from the public rules<p>3) I suspect that the amount of revenue that a company brings through their app also affects how rules are applied<p>But, it&#x27;s their platform and they can do whatever the hell the way with no (legal) consequences at all.

Any applications that is (by accident <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;beza1e1.tuxen.de&#x2F;articles&#x2F;accidentally_turing_complete.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;beza1e1.tuxen.de&#x2F;articles&#x2F;accidentally_turing_complet...</a> ) turing complete is not allowed on AppStore?

I hope play.js isn’t next. It lets users install packages from npmjs.

Hadn’t heard of iSH before now, but I just downloaded. Seems likely that this will become another example of Streisand effect!

Honest question:<p>What would this app be useful for?

Is this built on qemu?

It’s just a matter of time before they come after code push. We’re all going to regret being serfs cowed by the Apple hegemony.

This sucks. Please don’t do this Apple

Developers who still support apples ecosystem are in denial

Users have no power with Apple actions. Developers do have such power. Don’t build for them and they’ll listen.

Call me crazy, but I&#x27;ll bet this has something to do with youtube-dl and the RIAA DMCA takedown. Apple probably got wind that you could install youtube-dl on iSH and &quot;infringe&quot; on copyright.

Apple won&#x27;t allow you to run youtube-dl on your iOS device. Section 2.5.2 is just the excuse. If 2.5.2 didn&#x27;t cover it, they&#x27;d make up another rule to do so.<p>Apple isn&#x27;t going to let people sidestep copyright on iOS. It doesn&#x27;t matter whether youtube-dl or curl or wget have legitimate uses. If they can be used to sidestep copyright, Apple will ban them.<p>I&#x27;m an Apple user. This pisses me off too.

Good, Apple, continue shooting yourself in the foot. Users will totally like this.

<i>Google lets banks remotely disable phones</i> [0]: 114 points in 11 hours<p><i>Google lets apps prevent users from taking screenshots</i> [1]: 315 points in 14 hours<p>Devs on HN shrug it off when an app screws over users, but they take to pitchforks when an app is removed.<p>There&#x27;s also a heavy bias in favor of Google and against Apple on HN, but Apple does nothing nearly as hostile to <i>users</i>, and so millions of people will continue to happily give their money to Apple.<p>Only user-hostile developers fail to understand this and clamor for Apple&#x27;s restrictions to be weakened so they can prey more freely upon users.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25026050" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25026050</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25025066" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25025066</a>

The practice of rigging app store removals as a means of increasing launch-hype is becoming an increasingly utilized marketing technique for apps. The &quot;Hey&quot; e-mail app successfully used this tactic recently. This marketing technique is a form of social engineering and fraud that spurs artificial discourse regarding well-known legal hurdles affecting apps. App developers then re-publish a compliant app that capitalizes on the very marketplace that the app developer and their pool of new users claim some deep-seated issue with. The old switcheroo!