> But that’s not what happened at all. Godier proceeded through a series of escalations up to the App Review Board and the Review Board responded that they determined the original rejection was valid because, I shit you not, “We understand that the app includes a live tarot reading feature.”
> It has no tarot function, no horoscopes, and nothing that I, or anyone else I’ve asked, would associate with astrology.
I have dealt with the Byzantine App Store bureaucracy before. What you do here, is you submit a new version, pretty much identical to the previous one, with the comment “tarot function removed”.
But then you're lying. Why not add the comment "no tarot function" without reference to whether it existed in the past? A bit confusing because it's a trivial and seemingly unrelated statement but at least then you wouldn't be lying.
Why not just lie? The white lie is the most expedient thing to get the results you want, which is getting the app into the app store. It's not a slippery slope into a total moral decay of you as a human being. If a friend is hiding from an abusive partner, and that partner asks where your friend is, telling the truth would put your friend in danger, so lying is an important skill to have. The lie in this case gets past a pointless requirement.
You can just add one and then remove it. That way you're not lying. And also it doesn't sound like you're disagreeing with them so you sound like a problem.
> Is Gruber starting to realize Apple's monopoly is bad?
"I do not see the conflict between the view that the App Store review system is failing and the view that it's not the government's business to intervene. Allowing failing systems to fail is how market forces work." https://mastodon.social/@gruber/117055639204173161
The other side of your coin is that I need to periodically visit my relatives and remove all sorts of malware and adware from their phones. Just like I've done with PCs over the past few decades.
Oh, is the 100$/year developer fee not enough? And all the money people pay for their devices? And the 30% cut for any App Store transaction? And the money from the advertisements?
Poor Apple needs to ask for even more money to do their job?
You really can't just imagine Apple is doing a shit job.
None of what you say can explain that Apple reviewers falsely accuse an app of being astrology when absolutely nothing proves it and double down when shown they are wrong. Again, absolutely nothing there could be explained by an "exponential number of submissions" nor solved by charging developers (even more than they already do!).
In my last SRE role I was the unfortunate victim of having to maintain a mobile app submitted to both the Android and iOS app stores. I would never wish it on my worst enemy. It was the one thing that I could absolutely _not_ guarantee any sort of reliability with. It was all up to the random person who happened to review the current release and the release process could be as quick as a day in the best circumstances or up to two weeks if we got a particularly difficult reviewer. They seem to have absolutely no context sharing between reviews.
Look up "wireless printing" in the App Store sometime. As best I can tell, one or two actors have spammed the entire category with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of subscription-heavy repackagings of CUPS drivers as iOS apps. They all have very similar blue line-art icons of a printer, similar preview images with similar typography, and are all crammed full of subscription options.
They are probably making a killing on people who forgot about or can't figure out how to cancel the $4.99/week subscription on the top 20-30 of these apps.
All this while of course the one app you've been working on for a year will be held up with multiple rounds of rejections weeks apart. For all the good Cook has done in his 15 years at Apple, the App Store will be the one real stain on his legacy, and I hope Ternus is as acutely cognizant of that as the developer community is.
> the App Store will be the one real stain on his legacy
Well, and the Apple Car. And the Butterfly Keyboard and that horrible i9 16" MBP. Plus the Airpower, and the Vision Pro, and he cancelled the entire Mac Pro lineup too. Also the $1,000 VESA monitor mount and goofy desktop wheels, and we should probably also mention his meetings with Donald Trump and eventual White House dinner with Bin Salman. Tim also failed to legally deter NSO Group, held a grudge against Nvidia during a $4 trillion ARM/CUDA datacenter boom, greenlit Liquid Glass, proposed Client-Side Scanning and fought dirty against organic and reasonable EU regulations.
But besides that, yes, the pitiful state of the App Store will be remembered as his true strategic slip-up.
(b) Don’t submit apps that are indistinguishable from what's already widely available. Opportunistically creating variants of existing app categories or popular apps degrades App Store discovery, reduces overall app quality, and harms both users and developers. Certain kinds of apps, such as dating, flashlight, sound effects, wallpaper, simple timers, and fortune telling, are well established on the App Store and we will not accept new submissions unless they offer a meaningfully different or improved experience. We may remove these apps from the App Store going forward if they are not updated, improved, or do not attract customers. Other kinds of apps, such as drinking games, Kama Sutra, fart, and burp apps, are mediocre, low-quality, or low-effort and do not add value to the App Store. Repeated submissions of this kind may lead to removal from the Apple Developer Program.
This is such a dumb policy, and it's absolutely not even being followed.
I submitted a timer app this year and it got approved. It's literally just a slightly more feature-rich timer.
I made this as a "my first app" type of experience. Never at any point was the quality of my app questioned, and I'm the first person who will tell you that it's not very good.
I imagine astronomers have been sighing resignedly at dinner parties for a couple of millenia:
In the Hellenistic world, the Greek words 'astrologia' and 'astronomia' were often used interchangeably, but they were conceptually not the same.
In his compilatory work Etymologiae [c. 625], Isidore of Seville noted explicitly the difference between the terms astronomy and astrology (Etymologiae, III, xxvii) and the same distinction appeared later in the texts of Arabian writers.
It's a massive problem that mobile apps are most users favorite way to consume programs yet are one of the few forms of distribution being gatekept by two massive and opinionated companies. It feels like the slow creeping rot at the foundation of the premise (and promise) of technology and the internet.
Which makes this a good time to remind everyone about the Keep Android Open movement:
> "Starting in 2027*, a silent update, nonconsensually pushed by Google, will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed over government ID."
It's been selective for sure. I have a macOS app that has been approved within a day. There are two apps I submit for a client both have cleared review twice in the past two weeks within 24 hours.
On the other hand I have a personal iOS app that normally doesn't take long to approve that's been waiting two weeks.
Perhaps try and not collide your name with a horror survival game that involves a trickster demonic clown who tosses mysterious game-changing cards at you? I mean, I'm just guessing here.
This entity is a demon-like clown that plays tricks on its victims. It is accompanied by Jack n Boxes that are triggered by cards he leaves around that offer good and bad results - the good result being the box that has a symbol that relates to the card you pick up. Instead of just killing you when he catches up, you have to go through what I call a "Just Dance" challenge. Hit the WASD, or whatever your keybinds are, when the indication reaches the box.
I've published both iOS and visionOS apps, and my favorite rejection came from visionOS. When you click a link to open it in Safari, the system uses an existing Safari window if available. The app was rejected because the link didn’t work... the reviewer had Safari open somewhere outside their field of view. Approved on appeal :)
as much as i loathe astrology, im not sure why astrology would be blanket banned in the first place.
and i am surprised that apps like "Night Sky" (great app, no affiliation) made it past review if the app store reviewers are incapable of telling the difference.
The "Astrology" reason emphasized in the article isn't the main reason, they actually quickly talk about it:
> the App Review Board and the Review Board responded that they determined the original rejection was valid because, I shit you not, “We understand that the app includes a live tarot reading feature.”
So that's it, they need to remove the live tarot reading. Which to me while not being astrology, isn't much better.
I actually thought the article could be more explicit about that, but in fairness I think the author figured readers were familiar with the app and that it would be obvious there’s no tarot functionality.
This kind of thing reminds me of why I've always felt there shouldn't be a gatekeeper. Add your repos, install your apps. Folks should be allowed to have more than one repo to install apps from.
But if you allow users to have freedom, grandma will get hacked! We should all be told what to do and where to go and rely on gatekeepers for permission, for safety. (And no, of course there’s not any solution that would allow competent individuals to go outside the safe zone.)
There is an easy solution to this: Allow the user to decide whether they want to allow for apps from outside a particular ecosystem. Then Johnny can set up Grandma's phone and (in a deep byzantine menu where she will never accidentally stumble on it, maybe locked behind a pin), Johnny can set it so that Granny's phone can only install software from "Super premium, high class, curated, guaranteed not to hack your phone" walled garden app store. And Johnny, on his own phone, can choose what to download himself, including from the "Buyer Beware, half our shit is malware" dark web app store.
In my opinion, the Apple app store should actually be FAR more curated than it is, and far less curated options should be equally available. The Apple App store (and the Google app store for that matter), should be a relatively small list of apps that have extremely high standards and guarantees. It should essentially be impossible for spammy bullshit to get into these places. User-controlled, parental control like options should determine whether or not other app sources can be installed from (including allowing for specific other sources, so that app source control can be granular and detailed. I should be allowed to add FDroid but nothing else for example).
Done. Problem solved. Everyone is happy. Grandma is safe and Johnny has control over his phone.
But of course, that assumes that keeping Granny safe is actually the reason. Facially obviously, it is not, and is in fact entirely pretextual.
There are two big problems with this (not that Apple’s caprice is the only alternative):
1. The vast majority of people are Grandma, and they do not have a Johnny available to administer their tech. Most people are not technical.
2. The vast majority of Grandmas will follow instructions on a “how do I share cute photo” website even when that website directs them to dig deep into configuration settings and ignore six “are you sure you want to allow this app to fully remotely control your device?” warnings. Even if Grandma has a healthy suspicion of scams, when she is instead trying to accomplish a goal she will suddenly prove quite adept at giving software with questionable provenance root access to her life.
And what if my grandma is Admiral Hopper. I wonder if there's a way to argue for or against paternalistic corporate gatekeepers without invoking sexism, ageism, or both?
The society should change such that grandmas could decide for themselves whether they want tech or not, and still have a comfortable life if they choose to not use it. In our current society, smartphones and the internet are forced on everyone. It's not really a choice any more. Which is quite sad.
My grandma does want tech because she loves sharing pictures with her grandchildren throughout the day. That doesn’t mean she wants to send money to Nigeria through a fake banking app?
My concern has been that companies with a huge install base (hi, Meta) would take advantage of this: "in order to provide you with the best experience, you have to turn off the restricted flag to install the next release of our app".
And then, billions of users cry out in pain as their private data is hoovered into the panopticon in the cloud.
Exactly, and it’s impossible to regulate those business practices! Don’t even try! Better to limit what people can do on their own computing devices, or better yet remove that ownership entirely.
That's great until your device is weaponised against others (see: open HTTP proxies, open DNS resolvers, open SMTP servers, several billion IoT devices, and countless other examples)
Exactly, which is why we shouldn’t be allowing user “software installs” on any device, not just phones. The world would be a lot better if all tech were fully locked down, “freedom” be damned.
There's a saying about how hard it can be to design bear-resistant containers:
> There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.
The same is true for computers. Solutions that "allow competent individuals" to do something are also typically solutions scammers can convince Grandma to perform without understanding what they do.
Exactly, computers should only be allowed to do what expert gatekeepers deem safe. There is no possible way to allow competent users to bypass this. Even if they had to go submit a blood sample and sign a document in front of a judge, grandma would just do it anyway! Lock it all down and make sure that compilers require a government license.
Correct. As a side benefit we can restrict users from installing applications that go against other societal interests, like apps that allow unrestricted communications. The framework is complete for mobile devices, we just need to tackle PCs now.
Loudly dismissing genuine and legitimate concerns may feel good, but it’s not likely to get you what you want, especially at a societal level.
I agree with you on the risks of this sort of protection! But I understand what it’s like for non-technical folks in a technical society. Their needs do matter.
You’re precisely right, and of course there’s no possible way on Earth that we could create a safe way to allow users to install apps outside of the blessed path. No matter how many steps people have to go through, even if they have to pass a special exam to prove their competence, even if they have to sign something that says they could lose their life savings and submit it to a court to document this fact. There’s just not a single possible way to protect people to an adequate degree.
That the gatekeeper and government benefit from this arrangement is just a happy accident.
Glad you agree that it’s simply impossible to protect most people and have freedom. Hopefully we can extend this approach to other areas of life soon. “Freedom” is overrated anyways!
Scammers will manage to manipulate people into giving away all of their savings just fine no matter what restrictions are put in place. The excuse is just another "think of the children" to maintain control and profit.
So your solution is to ban the sale of any kind of knife. Sucks that people can't really cook at home anymore, but do we have to make it trivially easy for murderers?
The arbitrariness of app store review hasn't been the greatest on the Google side, for me lately anyway. I got dinged for having an E-rating for my TV show info app that displays an official promo image for an episode of Landman, where a character has a wound with some blood on his face.
I pointed out that there were a couple other E-rated apps that show the exact same image, and many more T-rated ones that only warn of "In-App Purchases" — no "Violence" label. One of the latter is the official Google TV app [0], so I sent some screenshots of that, and asked if maybe they were "crushing the competition" by avoiding their own review process, to see if that would escalate my case (no such luck).
The concept of computers that for programs to run on them need to be submitted to a committee who decides if the users computer can run it or not felt like where the tides were going for a long time.
Post AI this starts to feel absurd and look if OpenAI release a hardware device with an App Store will the process be days to weeks of review or will it be vibe code it in 40 minutes hit publish and it’s available to every device in 2 minutes?
Yeah think software is thankfully going towards a world where bureaucracy isn’t respected.
The apple decides what the box or square in your hand can do era is over.
Building web apps is far more enjoyable if only because you don't have to deal with the capricious nature of Apple's App Store review. It's non-deterministic CI at best.
Probably not directly, but indirect by the anti spam criteria: If there are too many similar apps, from whatever category, they will just reject new apps.
My immediate thought upon clicking the link referenced in the article, is that the first thing I see is at first glance looks like astrological signs taking up the entire height of the page.
I'm not defending Apple at all (I'm a developer, I've not specifically worked on apps for iDevices, however I've worked closely with those that take our platforms and tie them into those apps at many companies and startups)
I've also not finished reading the article, however right away, based on what I've read, I see the problem. Apple reviews a thousands upon thousands of apps a day, and the folks reviewing those apps (and now, AI) aren't going to continue to review an app when they see a potential violation. It is up to the app developer to be clear and concise.
Apple is a pain to deal with, I get that. However, I see why it was rejected. Continuing to read the article now.
EDIT: read the rest of it. My take is that they are probably employing AI based upon the odd response (which is dumb, also note, Apple has been using forms of machine learning for years to assist with this stuff. When I say AI, I specifically refer to LLMs).
Something that I think folks really need to pay attention to, however, is the first impression. The app reviewer doesn't just hit a reject button and call it a day. They take notes. Notes that aren't shared with you, just among folks that may review it again in the future. When it is re-reviewed, those notes are taken into consideration and given a ton of weight. That is why it is important to give a perfect presentation the first time around. If you have 30 seconds to re-review an app that was rejected and you have notes (and possibly a screenshot or two? I don't know if Apple does that part) of what was presented during the previous review, you aren't going to do a whole bunch of investigating if it looks like nothing has changed. You have deadlines that impact your performance review, you will move on and rubber stamp the re-review. The next level up will take slightly longer, etc.
Well then you clearly should have read it first. As it kept getting escalated and went to review board and was still rejected stating first review was correct.
Their business model depends on you not looking too closely here. Apple has a lot of legitimate advantages, but they oversell the safety of the App Store quite a bit, and they also have an infamous review process for apps that deliberately hides both the reasoning and any sort of estimation of false positive / false negative rate. Google should have these sort of stats as well, but obviously neither company would publish them. False negatives should be observable by the public.
I'm a fan of letting users add repos from vendors they trust, so there isn't one centralized gatekeeper.
I wonder what the internals of the App Store process are. For most app approval processes you can tell because you'll get connections from the Philippines etc. so I assume what's going on here is that these reviewers have a range of English proficiency with a median below what an American developer is used to. Then the rest is just hallucination from the human, guessing at what they're looking at.
I had my privacy policy on a Lovable site. The embedded browser UI for the reviewer didn’t render JS and they would say I didn’t have a privacy policy. Took forever to figure out but tbh it’s my fault: the privacy policy should be visible on no JS.
Many years ago, like in 2017, my wife and I designed a dating app that was based on astrological matching. We knew it was tongue in cheek and advertised at as such. At that time we got a clear rejection from the App Store that they were no longer going to allow astrology apps. Fair enough, we pivoted the dating app to something else and it has been in the store doing fine for years now. But what we noticed was sometime around 2020, all of a sudden apple allowed a huge influx of new astrology apps into the store. It made no sense to us and seemed like bullshit, but what can you do?
Honestly, reading this, I kinda feel they have an AI integration in the review tool, which hallucinate and tell them it’s Astrology and employees at that level don’t want to go against that judgement
I've been waiting for several days on my MacOS app review. After many successful releases, somebody has decided to nitpick the App description. Fixed and resubmitted. Then, another rejection for some other related aspect of the description. Fixed and resubmitted, now waiting on next review.
I'm good to make the description complaint, of course, but it seems the reviewer immediately halts as soon as they encounter any issue. Would have been nice to get both feedback points on the first response, especially given how long it can take to get back to the top of the queue.
At the end of the day, I regret my choice to use the App Store at all.
The most evil (yes) thing about the rejection is that the same stupid wrong misinformation about the app continued to be rubber-stamped as it propagated forward in what should be increasing levels of actual scrutiny and attention. They are lying to call it a review - it's mindless rubber-stamping either by design or because Apple employs people who just can't be bothered to do their jobs.
> In a sworn deposition in the Epic lawsuit, Phillip Shoemaker, the former head of the App Review team, said employees in his department generally did not have a technical background in computer coding. They needed to know how to use a Mac and an iPhone, he said.
> “Qualifications were that they could breathe, they could think,” he said. And they typically worked at the Apple “Genius Bar” at the company’s retail stores. It typically took about 13 minutes to review a new app, Shoemaker said in the deposition.
This isn't really a bad thing. That's exactly what you want from an app reviewer. You want someone who has critical thinking skills but is looking at the app from the perspective of a typical customer.
Anything involving technical code review of apps on Apple's scale should be automated anyway.
That's not what the court testimony said. Could think does not imply could think critically, especially not when preceded by "could breathe", which is an absurdly low bar. Might as well say, "not literally dead".
118 comments:
> But that’s not what happened at all. Godier proceeded through a series of escalations up to the App Review Board and the Review Board responded that they determined the original rejection was valid because, I shit you not, “We understand that the app includes a live tarot reading feature.”
> It has no tarot function, no horoscopes, and nothing that I, or anyone else I’ve asked, would associate with astrology.
I have dealt with the Byzantine App Store bureaucracy before. What you do here, is you submit a new version, pretty much identical to the previous one, with the comment “tarot function removed”.
But then you're lying. Why not add the comment "no tarot function" without reference to whether it existed in the past? A bit confusing because it's a trivial and seemingly unrelated statement but at least then you wouldn't be lying.
Why not just lie? The white lie is the most expedient thing to get the results you want, which is getting the app into the app store. It's not a slippery slope into a total moral decay of you as a human being. If a friend is hiding from an abusive partner, and that partner asks where your friend is, telling the truth would put your friend in danger, so lying is an important skill to have. The lie in this case gets past a pointless requirement.
Eh because, the emperor has no clothes, jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams
You can just add one and then remove it. That way you're not lying. And also it doesn't sound like you're disagreeing with them so you sound like a problem.
because it would be rejected again
"Tarot function is not present in this version, and won't be present in any releases future ever".
That makes it sound like they made a mistake.
They did.
Is Gruber starting to realize Apple's monopoly is bad?
App stores should not exist in a world where only two phone operating systems exist. All apps MUST be installable via web.
Come on, EU. Help us out here. Free us from distribution tyranny. Do it before Google morphs into the same hell beast.
Soon you won't be able to read unapproved, unattested bytes. It's coming. We need as many freedoms as we can get.
Apple can be a great company without the app store monopoly. So can Google.
> Is Gruber starting to realize Apple's monopoly is bad?
"I do not see the conflict between the view that the App Store review system is failing and the view that it's not the government's business to intervene. Allowing failing systems to fail is how market forces work." https://mastodon.social/@gruber/117055639204173161
The criticism of monopolies is that market forces aren't able to let a failing system fail.
The App Store doesn't compete on its own merits because Apple actively prevents competition from letting it decide what the better system is.
I believe Gruber's view is that the market forces in question are between iPhone and competing smartphones.
The other side of your coin is that I need to periodically visit my relatives and remove all sorts of malware and adware from their phones. Just like I've done with PCs over the past few decades.
I get your point but neither the Play store or the Apple app store are devoid of malware.
Obviously the solution is to restrict the stores to a small, government-licensed list of apps that are known to be safe and regulated.
Then you get government censorship. China for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
Then Apple should do its fucking job correctly. It is not a poor little company, they have no excuse for this rank incompetence. None.
I'm sure the number of submissions has gone up exponentially due to AI.
Since real people review apps, Apple should charge per app / version submission.
Oh, is the 100$/year developer fee not enough? And all the money people pay for their devices? And the 30% cut for any App Store transaction? And the money from the advertisements?
Poor Apple needs to ask for even more money to do their job?
Sure seems like they could find some other way.
You really can't just imagine Apple is doing a shit job.
None of what you say can explain that Apple reviewers falsely accuse an app of being astrology when absolutely nothing proves it and double down when shown they are wrong. Again, absolutely nothing there could be explained by an "exponential number of submissions" nor solved by charging developers (even more than they already do!).
Stop defending the indefensible.
It can explain, but it can’t excuse.
God forbids your relatives ever touch computers!
> Come on, EU. Help us out here. Free us from distribution tyranny. Do it before Google morphs into the same hell beast.
No can do, EU is busy mandating only Google/Apple devices for national digital ID.
> Soon you won't be able to read unapproved, unattested bytes. It's coming.
happy EU noises
In my last SRE role I was the unfortunate victim of having to maintain a mobile app submitted to both the Android and iOS app stores. I would never wish it on my worst enemy. It was the one thing that I could absolutely _not_ guarantee any sort of reliability with. It was all up to the random person who happened to review the current release and the release process could be as quick as a day in the best circumstances or up to two weeks if we got a particularly difficult reviewer. They seem to have absolutely no context sharing between reviews.
What an insane ruling considering Co-Star is entirely an astrology app and was picked as an app store "Editor's Choice" at some point.
They arn't against Astrology apps. It's that there are a few categories where apple has just stopped allowing new ones since there are so many.
if true. this is insane
Are those documented anywhere?
Somewhat, but still very subjective. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#spa...
You can still always get around them (at least my experience), but it just takes a lot of time
Look up "wireless printing" in the App Store sometime. As best I can tell, one or two actors have spammed the entire category with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of subscription-heavy repackagings of CUPS drivers as iOS apps. They all have very similar blue line-art icons of a printer, similar preview images with similar typography, and are all crammed full of subscription options.
They are probably making a killing on people who forgot about or can't figure out how to cancel the $4.99/week subscription on the top 20-30 of these apps.
All this while of course the one app you've been working on for a year will be held up with multiple rounds of rejections weeks apart. For all the good Cook has done in his 15 years at Apple, the App Store will be the one real stain on his legacy, and I hope Ternus is as acutely cognizant of that as the developer community is.
> the App Store will be the one real stain on his legacy
Well, and the Apple Car. And the Butterfly Keyboard and that horrible i9 16" MBP. Plus the Airpower, and the Vision Pro, and he cancelled the entire Mac Pro lineup too. Also the $1,000 VESA monitor mount and goofy desktop wheels, and we should probably also mention his meetings with Donald Trump and eventual White House dinner with Bin Salman. Tim also failed to legally deter NSO Group, held a grudge against Nvidia during a $4 trillion ARM/CUDA datacenter boom, greenlit Liquid Glass, proposed Client-Side Scanning and fought dirty against organic and reasonable EU regulations.
But besides that, yes, the pitiful state of the App Store will be remembered as his true strategic slip-up.
The guideline:
(b) Don’t submit apps that are indistinguishable from what's already widely available. Opportunistically creating variants of existing app categories or popular apps degrades App Store discovery, reduces overall app quality, and harms both users and developers. Certain kinds of apps, such as dating, flashlight, sound effects, wallpaper, simple timers, and fortune telling, are well established on the App Store and we will not accept new submissions unless they offer a meaningfully different or improved experience. We may remove these apps from the App Store going forward if they are not updated, improved, or do not attract customers. Other kinds of apps, such as drinking games, Kama Sutra, fart, and burp apps, are mediocre, low-quality, or low-effort and do not add value to the App Store. Repeated submissions of this kind may lead to removal from the Apple Developer Program.
This is such a dumb policy, and it's absolutely not even being followed.
I submitted a timer app this year and it got approved. It's literally just a slightly more feature-rich timer.
I made this as a "my first app" type of experience. Never at any point was the quality of my app questioned, and I'm the first person who will tell you that it's not very good.
Don't worry. The next time you spend lots of time developing an app, Apple will be sure to reject it multiple times ;p
The words astro-nomy and astro-logy are similar, but this is no "fluke".
There's a Wikipedia article with some history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrology_and_astronomy
I imagine astronomers have been sighing resignedly at dinner parties for a couple of millenia:
In the Hellenistic world, the Greek words 'astrologia' and 'astronomia' were often used interchangeably, but they were conceptually not the same.
In his compilatory work Etymologiae [c. 625], Isidore of Seville noted explicitly the difference between the terms astronomy and astrology (Etymologiae, III, xxvii) and the same distinction appeared later in the texts of Arabian writers.
It's a massive problem that mobile apps are most users favorite way to consume programs yet are one of the few forms of distribution being gatekept by two massive and opinionated companies. It feels like the slow creeping rot at the foundation of the premise (and promise) of technology and the internet.
Which makes this a good time to remind everyone about the Keep Android Open movement:
https://keepandroidopen.org/
> "Starting in 2027*, a silent update, nonconsensually pushed by Google, will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed over government ID."
This is funny because they aren't approving anything right now
Developers are wondering if they are the only ones on their forums: https://developer.apple.com/forums/topics/app-store-distribu...
It's been selective for sure. I have a macOS app that has been approved within a day. There are two apps I submit for a client both have cleared review twice in the past two weeks within 24 hours.
On the other hand I have a personal iOS app that normally doesn't take long to approve that's been waiting two weeks.
Perhaps try and not collide your name with a horror survival game that involves a trickster demonic clown who tosses mysterious game-changing cards at you? I mean, I'm just guessing here.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=33623...
I've published both iOS and visionOS apps, and my favorite rejection came from visionOS. When you click a link to open it in Safari, the system uses an existing Safari window if available. The app was rejected because the link didn’t work... the reviewer had Safari open somewhere outside their field of view. Approved on appeal :)
as much as i loathe astrology, im not sure why astrology would be blanket banned in the first place.
and i am surprised that apps like "Night Sky" (great app, no affiliation) made it past review if the app store reviewers are incapable of telling the difference.
https://darkhours.io/ does look really cool, i hope they get this sorted out.
This is likely an outlier. I submitted a new astronomy app (even with “Astro” in the name!) just a few months ago with no problem.
Wow, that is beautiful.
The "Astrology" reason emphasized in the article isn't the main reason, they actually quickly talk about it:
> the App Review Board and the Review Board responded that they determined the original rejection was valid because, I shit you not, “We understand that the app includes a live tarot reading feature.”
So that's it, they need to remove the live tarot reading. Which to me while not being astrology, isn't much better.
Sounds like you'd make a fantastic iOS App Store submission reviewer!
There is no live tarot feature. Thats the point.
i put tarot + astrology in the same bucket (and, it appears after some quick searches, so do astrologers and tarot-readers or however you call them)
>So that's it, they need to remove the live tarot reading.
dark hours doesnt have live tarot reading.
It is impressive that you seemingly read the article and still don't know what it was about.
You missed the fact that the article also explained there is no feature like that in the app.
I actually thought the article could be more explicit about that, but in fairness I think the author figured readers were familiar with the app and that it would be obvious there’s no tarot functionality.
What could be more explicit than this?
> It has no tarot function, no horoscopes, and nothing that I, or anyone else I’ve asked, would associate with astrology.
Did you read the article the app contains no such thing anywhere it’s an astronomy app not astrology and is deeply rooted in real science
This kind of thing reminds me of why I've always felt there shouldn't be a gatekeeper. Add your repos, install your apps. Folks should be allowed to have more than one repo to install apps from.
But if you allow users to have freedom, grandma will get hacked! We should all be told what to do and where to go and rely on gatekeepers for permission, for safety. (And no, of course there’s not any solution that would allow competent individuals to go outside the safe zone.)
There is an easy solution to this: Allow the user to decide whether they want to allow for apps from outside a particular ecosystem. Then Johnny can set up Grandma's phone and (in a deep byzantine menu where she will never accidentally stumble on it, maybe locked behind a pin), Johnny can set it so that Granny's phone can only install software from "Super premium, high class, curated, guaranteed not to hack your phone" walled garden app store. And Johnny, on his own phone, can choose what to download himself, including from the "Buyer Beware, half our shit is malware" dark web app store.
In my opinion, the Apple app store should actually be FAR more curated than it is, and far less curated options should be equally available. The Apple App store (and the Google app store for that matter), should be a relatively small list of apps that have extremely high standards and guarantees. It should essentially be impossible for spammy bullshit to get into these places. User-controlled, parental control like options should determine whether or not other app sources can be installed from (including allowing for specific other sources, so that app source control can be granular and detailed. I should be allowed to add FDroid but nothing else for example).
Done. Problem solved. Everyone is happy. Grandma is safe and Johnny has control over his phone.
But of course, that assumes that keeping Granny safe is actually the reason. Facially obviously, it is not, and is in fact entirely pretextual.
There are two big problems with this (not that Apple’s caprice is the only alternative):
1. The vast majority of people are Grandma, and they do not have a Johnny available to administer their tech. Most people are not technical.
2. The vast majority of Grandmas will follow instructions on a “how do I share cute photo” website even when that website directs them to dig deep into configuration settings and ignore six “are you sure you want to allow this app to fully remotely control your device?” warnings. Even if Grandma has a healthy suspicion of scams, when she is instead trying to accomplish a goal she will suddenly prove quite adept at giving software with questionable provenance root access to her life.
And what if my grandma is Admiral Hopper. I wonder if there's a way to argue for or against paternalistic corporate gatekeepers without invoking sexism, ageism, or both?
I used the terms from the grandparent post with tongue firmly in cheek. I didn’t intend to be sexist or ageist and agree with your criticism.
The society should change such that grandmas could decide for themselves whether they want tech or not, and still have a comfortable life if they choose to not use it. In our current society, smartphones and the internet are forced on everyone. It's not really a choice any more. Which is quite sad.
My grandma does want tech because she loves sharing pictures with her grandchildren throughout the day. That doesn’t mean she wants to send money to Nigeria through a fake banking app?
Then how about her not having online banking?
You did the meme. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
Last time I was in a bank branch they told me to go to the website for my issue.
You grandma can keep the „restricted“ flag on then. I will be happy to disable it on my device
Grandma will also be happy to disable it when the nice man from Microsoft phone support calls in to remotely fix the viruses she has.
My concern has been that companies with a huge install base (hi, Meta) would take advantage of this: "in order to provide you with the best experience, you have to turn off the restricted flag to install the next release of our app".
And then, billions of users cry out in pain as their private data is hoovered into the panopticon in the cloud.
Exactly, and it’s impossible to regulate those business practices! Don’t even try! Better to limit what people can do on their own computing devices, or better yet remove that ownership entirely.
That's great until your device is weaponised against others (see: open HTTP proxies, open DNS resolvers, open SMTP servers, several billion IoT devices, and countless other examples)
Exactly, which is why we shouldn’t be allowing user “software installs” on any device, not just phones. The world would be a lot better if all tech were fully locked down, “freedom” be damned.
There's a saying about how hard it can be to design bear-resistant containers:
> There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.
The same is true for computers. Solutions that "allow competent individuals" to do something are also typically solutions scammers can convince Grandma to perform without understanding what they do.
(Case in point: I saw a fake captcha that told you to open Terminal and paste a command to "prove" you're human; https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/1rq4bh6/warning_suspic...)
Exactly, computers should only be allowed to do what expert gatekeepers deem safe. There is no possible way to allow competent users to bypass this. Even if they had to go submit a blood sample and sign a document in front of a judge, grandma would just do it anyway! Lock it all down and make sure that compilers require a government license.
The flip side of this is:
Pro: I can use a convoluted process to install an astronomy app Apple didn't like.
Con: Billions of dollars of life savings siphoned off with devastating consequences.
I'm by no means a maximalist on either side of this, but technologists aren't the only ones who get a say here.
Correct. As a side benefit we can restrict users from installing applications that go against other societal interests, like apps that allow unrestricted communications. The framework is complete for mobile devices, we just need to tackle PCs now.
Loudly dismissing genuine and legitimate concerns may feel good, but it’s not likely to get you what you want, especially at a societal level.
I agree with you on the risks of this sort of protection! But I understand what it’s like for non-technical folks in a technical society. Their needs do matter.
You’re precisely right, and of course there’s no possible way on Earth that we could create a safe way to allow users to install apps outside of the blessed path. No matter how many steps people have to go through, even if they have to pass a special exam to prove their competence, even if they have to sign something that says they could lose their life savings and submit it to a court to document this fact. There’s just not a single possible way to protect people to an adequate degree.
That the gatekeeper and government benefit from this arrangement is just a happy accident.
There isn’t a way for everyone to be able to do what they want with computing devices and be safe from this shit.
That’s the reality. As with most things in society, it’s left to people to negotiate the balance.
Glad you agree that it’s simply impossible to protect most people and have freedom. Hopefully we can extend this approach to other areas of life soon. “Freedom” is overrated anyways!
What freedom on the planet isn't restricted in some way for societal benefit?
I know, right! Here’s hoping we have many more restrictions in the future.
Why comment on a site with zero interest in actually interacting with people?
I think there’s probably others reading too.
Scammers will manage to manipulate people into giving away all of their savings just fine no matter what restrictions are put in place. The excuse is just another "think of the children" to maintain control and profit.
People will murder people, too.
We don't have to make it trivially easy.
So your solution is to ban the sale of any kind of knife. Sucks that people can't really cook at home anymore, but do we have to make it trivially easy for murderers?
The arbitrariness of app store review hasn't been the greatest on the Google side, for me lately anyway. I got dinged for having an E-rating for my TV show info app that displays an official promo image for an episode of Landman, where a character has a wound with some blood on his face.
I pointed out that there were a couple other E-rated apps that show the exact same image, and many more T-rated ones that only warn of "In-App Purchases" — no "Violence" label. One of the latter is the official Google TV app [0], so I sent some screenshots of that, and asked if maybe they were "crushing the competition" by avoiding their own review process, to see if that would escalate my case (no such luck).
[0] The image is still the same in the Google TV app, and Google Search surfaces the image in question S1 E10: https://www.google.com/search?q=landman+season+1
The concept of computers that for programs to run on them need to be submitted to a committee who decides if the users computer can run it or not felt like where the tides were going for a long time.
Post AI this starts to feel absurd and look if OpenAI release a hardware device with an App Store will the process be days to weeks of review or will it be vibe code it in 40 minutes hit publish and it’s available to every device in 2 minutes?
Yeah think software is thankfully going towards a world where bureaucracy isn’t respected.
The apple decides what the box or square in your hand can do era is over.
It's why I love React Native and over the air updates. So I don't have to deal with this roulette.
Building web apps is far more enjoyable if only because you don't have to deal with the capricious nature of Apple's App Store review. It's non-deterministic CI at best.
Is astrology not allowed in app store? That's kind of a weird thing to ban.
Probably not directly, but indirect by the anti spam criteria: If there are too many similar apps, from whatever category, they will just reject new apps.
I wouldn't say it applies to all categories. I highly doubt they'll ever do it to games no matter how many clones of clones get published
This doesnt affect casino app spam whatsoever.
What's so bad about tarot cards? I put it into the same pot as all the other religious stuff, all just believes.
> We understand that the app includes a live tarot reading feature
I don’t understand why tarot reading apps are banned, can someone enlighten me?
My immediate thought upon clicking the link referenced in the article, is that the first thing I see is at first glance looks like astrological signs taking up the entire height of the page.
I'm not defending Apple at all (I'm a developer, I've not specifically worked on apps for iDevices, however I've worked closely with those that take our platforms and tie them into those apps at many companies and startups)
I've also not finished reading the article, however right away, based on what I've read, I see the problem. Apple reviews a thousands upon thousands of apps a day, and the folks reviewing those apps (and now, AI) aren't going to continue to review an app when they see a potential violation. It is up to the app developer to be clear and concise.
Apple is a pain to deal with, I get that. However, I see why it was rejected. Continuing to read the article now.
EDIT: read the rest of it. My take is that they are probably employing AI based upon the odd response (which is dumb, also note, Apple has been using forms of machine learning for years to assist with this stuff. When I say AI, I specifically refer to LLMs).
Something that I think folks really need to pay attention to, however, is the first impression. The app reviewer doesn't just hit a reject button and call it a day. They take notes. Notes that aren't shared with you, just among folks that may review it again in the future. When it is re-reviewed, those notes are taken into consideration and given a ton of weight. That is why it is important to give a perfect presentation the first time around. If you have 30 seconds to re-review an app that was rejected and you have notes (and possibly a screenshot or two? I don't know if Apple does that part) of what was presented during the previous review, you aren't going to do a whole bunch of investigating if it looks like nothing has changed. You have deadlines that impact your performance review, you will move on and rubber stamp the re-review. The next level up will take slightly longer, etc.
Well then you clearly should have read it first. As it kept getting escalated and went to review board and was still rejected stating first review was correct.
I am quite an Apple fan, but this dampens my enthusiasm considerably.
How many great apps are rejected, but build by people without reach?
Just don't be a fan of corporations. Period.
Even the good ones, looking at you Valve.
Am I happy and satisfied customer of some companies? Yes. Not a fan, though.
Their business model depends on you not looking too closely here. Apple has a lot of legitimate advantages, but they oversell the safety of the App Store quite a bit, and they also have an infamous review process for apps that deliberately hides both the reasoning and any sort of estimation of false positive / false negative rate. Google should have these sort of stats as well, but obviously neither company would publish them. False negatives should be observable by the public.
I'm a fan of letting users add repos from vendors they trust, so there isn't one centralized gatekeeper.
overselling the safety is very euphemistic
many years ago we made a list of malware apps on the Mac App Store:
https://www.corecode.io/_malware_on_the_macappstore.html
(yes, the list was made after being disgruntled because totally legitimate apps were refused for nonsense reasons just like in this story)
I wonder how many people are turned off by iOS and have never bothered to learn to write an app for it in the first place?
I guest it wasn't "in the cards" for me
I wonder what the internals of the App Store process are. For most app approval processes you can tell because you'll get connections from the Philippines etc. so I assume what's going on here is that these reviewers have a range of English proficiency with a median below what an American developer is used to. Then the rest is just hallucination from the human, guessing at what they're looking at.
All of my app review submissions come back at like 2-3am, so yeah.
We had a client whose website geoblocked non-US IPs and failed several rounds of review until we gave up and put a copy of their privacy policy on S3.
I had my privacy policy on a Lovable site. The embedded browser UI for the reviewer didn’t render JS and they would say I didn’t have a privacy policy. Took forever to figure out but tbh it’s my fault: the privacy policy should be visible on no JS.
Many years ago, like in 2017, my wife and I designed a dating app that was based on astrological matching. We knew it was tongue in cheek and advertised at as such. At that time we got a clear rejection from the App Store that they were no longer going to allow astrology apps. Fair enough, we pivoted the dating app to something else and it has been in the store doing fine for years now. But what we noticed was sometime around 2020, all of a sudden apple allowed a huge influx of new astrology apps into the store. It made no sense to us and seemed like bullshit, but what can you do?
Honestly, reading this, I kinda feel they have an AI integration in the review tool, which hallucinate and tell them it’s Astrology and employees at that level don’t want to go against that judgement
I've been waiting for several days on my MacOS app review. After many successful releases, somebody has decided to nitpick the App description. Fixed and resubmitted. Then, another rejection for some other related aspect of the description. Fixed and resubmitted, now waiting on next review.
I'm good to make the description complaint, of course, but it seems the reviewer immediately halts as soon as they encounter any issue. Would have been nice to get both feedback points on the first response, especially given how long it can take to get back to the top of the queue.
At the end of the day, I regret my choice to use the App Store at all.
I look forward to this app now being approved because getting a viral post on reddit/HN/Twitter is what passes for customer service in 2026.
The worst part is that for all of this, the App Store is still absolutely chock full of fraud apps, scam apps, and malware.
They deny great apps, fail to fix their mistakes, and leave heaps and heaps of actively malicious apps in place, in the top 40 in every category.
And we pay them 10x cc processing fees (30% instead of 3%) for this.
It’s pure rentseeking bullshit, and it goes against everything that made Apple Apple. It’s an actual tragedy.
Reject this, but allow a billion spammy gambling scam apps pride of place in App Store searches. Gross.
Damn. What a shocking level of incompetence.
Has Apple really sunk that low?
The most evil (yes) thing about the rejection is that the same stupid wrong misinformation about the app continued to be rubber-stamped as it propagated forward in what should be increasing levels of actual scrutiny and attention. They are lying to call it a review - it's mindless rubber-stamping either by design or because Apple employs people who just can't be bothered to do their jobs.
From https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/apples-tigh...
> In a sworn deposition in the Epic lawsuit, Phillip Shoemaker, the former head of the App Review team, said employees in his department generally did not have a technical background in computer coding. They needed to know how to use a Mac and an iPhone, he said.
> “Qualifications were that they could breathe, they could think,” he said. And they typically worked at the Apple “Genius Bar” at the company’s retail stores. It typically took about 13 minutes to review a new app, Shoemaker said in the deposition.
They're likely just ticking boxes on a checklist - does the app crash, does the app have a privacy policy, does the app permit chat?
Nothing about level one app review should need coding skills. Appeals, maybe, but even there, it's almost never about the code.
This isn't really a bad thing. That's exactly what you want from an app reviewer. You want someone who has critical thinking skills but is looking at the app from the perspective of a typical customer.
Anything involving technical code review of apps on Apple's scale should be automated anyway.
> has critical thinking skills
That's not what the court testimony said. Could think does not imply could think critically, especially not when preceded by "could breathe", which is an absurdly low bar. Might as well say, "not literally dead".