Comment by bborud
4 years ago
This is the main reason why I am not interested in being an app developer. Your business is in the hands of someone who can cut you off and get away with not even giving you the time of day. Not worth the risk.
(That being said: I'm not sure I would have approved an app like yours since it is designed to invade privacy)
The hesitancy to approve is understood on my part. Have a child who's negatively impacted by tech though, or be married to someone who is, or attend an addiction recovery group for any online addiction, and you'll be persuaded otherwise. Apple allows parental control apps.
The business in this case is from a religious extremist and this kind of software is very frequently used without the user's consent.
Do you have any evidence of the software being used without the end user's consent?
Assuming children don't count? Their website has testimonials from people using it to monitor their spouse, which seems like quite the red flag to me.
Check the feature list in the OP and compare to these: https://lmgtfy.app/?q=spouse+tracking+app
That's very libelous of you.
You may like you and your young children being able to stream unlimited hardcore pornography to their iPads, but that doesn't mean other people have to like and allow it for themselves.
That is a frankly bigoted statement and one I'm use to seeing more on Reddit than HN. It is designed to be used voluntarily, or as parental controls for children. This is not $evilTechCompany coming to suck up all of your data.
I don't know if this person is an extremist. Religious or otherwise. Nor do I know anything about the organization they represent. But both in labeling someone an extremist, and in claiming that said label is bigoted, both parties owe the reader context which hasn't really been provided. So you both kind of accomplished nothing here.
Apps like this are, by design, able (and arguably designed) to be used involuntarily. If you abusive spouse tells you to install it, what can you do?
Isn't that all electronic businesses? I don't think anyone except maybe netflix actually controls their entire networking infrastructure. CDNs and cloud computing businesses make arbitrary decisions all the time. Payment processors, publishers..
To a greater or lesser degree yes, but there are things you can do to safeguard your business.
I don't think the biggest risk is really your hosting environment, but domain names. That's the one link in the chain that can really make life miserable if you were to lose your domain name. Which in effect is your identity. You can find replacement service providers for hosting. It may take you a bit of time to move things, but there isn't a lack of choice. It is harder to deal with losing a domain name that is essentially your brand.
However, I know several businesses whose product only runs on AWS and would need a ground-up rewrite to run anywhere else. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that is exceptionally poor risk management and if I were to find myself in this situation I'd have nobody else to blame but myself.
And this is transitive: if you are a customer of a product that is tied 100% to a single infrastructure provider and they are critical to your business, you must have a contingency plan in case they get into trouble.