There is no other manufacturer that sells what I want. The alternative is worse (Google) or incompatible with the reality of my daily life (my banks app won't work on it).
On the desktop side of things it's getting better, the Framework desktop is interesting, but there's still no REAL alternative yet. Maybe in 5 years.
Because that's a short-term, individual solution. But when companies do stuff that's bad for people generally, we want that stuff no longer done, generally.
Like, sure, I could buy medicine that isn't poisoned. But better would be to have no poison medicine - and that's how we got the FDA. Obviously this is extremely different, but the principle is the same: we don't like a behavior by a company, we can make that no longer happen if we want.
You completely missed the point of the post. It isn't about what phone they own. It's about what phone all the users own.
which is the same for the EU's Digital Markets Act. It's not the Smartphone Owner's Act. It's a law for letting business reach customers without having Apple in the middle. Apple (nor Google) can be allowed to have control over such a large market of customers betwen them and nearly every business.
Because Apple are one of the gatekeepers now, that's why they're getting regulated everywhere. It's not like how you can move from a Ford to a Honda, a lot of people have their entire digital lives with notes, chats, photos, videos and thousands of dollars of purchases tied to Apple's account, plus the network effect where the whole family has iPhone because of iMessage. Moving to another phone brands, they'd loose all that.
That's Apple's moat and they're fighting to the death for it because they don't have any other cash cow to milk.
If you're logging in from a country that historically has had a lot of fraud coming from it, this might be the reason why.
When travelling in Hungary my AWS account was banned the moment I tried to log in. I got basically no reason. I was able to call support but the guy very polite fobbed me off and I got the idea that they weren't even able to disclose the reason why they banned me.
Don't ever travel, never change anything related to billing except to update your cards before they expire. Don't change your name, email adresses or lose access to your phone number, and as we know now also don't ask support.
Then don't use any uncommon tools, e.g. ones associated with 'hacking', or store any copyrighted files in their cloud.
If there's any issue or error with logins etc., don't retry too quickly or too often or that in itself will be suspicious. Wait a day between requests, and double-check everything before retrying. Do not retry from a different IP or worse a VPN, or that will also be suspicious.
That should just about cover the bases for most providers.
Yes, it's insane and obviously you still need a backup of all your stuff just in case.
There was a time (a few weeks/months, I think?) when I've been getting that "imgur is over capacity, try again later" every time I tried to open an image posted there. First few times I wondered if imgur is really down, but haven't seen anyone in related comment sections complain, eventually I figured out that they are just lying to you with a fake error message if they don't like your IP for whatever reason, and the situation made me really angry (just return a 403 and say that the address is banned, damn it! It helps nobody to give a wrong error message and googling it just shows that many people have the same problem, scrapers will not be fooled by that anyway). After a while, I stopped getting those errors.
Similar situation to me. I got my Amazon account banned because I dared to use different Amazon websites with the same login. So amazon.de, .co.uk, .com ... I live in Norway where we don't have an official Amazon country..
Apparently I got flagged as suspicious, and every time I jump through the hoops to prove who I am, I get rejected.
I just stopped buying from Amazon.
Lost all my books, movies, tv shows. Everything. No recourse.
If my windows device fails, I'm not going to Microsoft. I either fix the offending part of my desktop or laptop, or reinstall the OS or move to a different OS. If something is wrong with my android phone, I'm not going to Google since I don't own a Pixel and will go to the manufacturer of the phone. If it's a purely software issue, there are steps I can actually take to flash a different ROM though admittedly it's not an easy process.
Here Apple not only owns the device but also the software it's running as well as distribution of apps for this device except for CLI tools distributed by brew or other package managers. At least with a Mac I can install and run applications over the Internet. With an iPhone that's not at all possible (not sure about the status of side loading with the EU ruling and all)
How many alternative operating systems work well on Apple devices?
Android phones usually have multiple options (Lineage, Calyx, eos, Graphene, depending on your particular phone) and you can always replace Windows with Linux.
Not really the case for Android, you skip the google account setup or the amazon account setup if you are using a fire tablet and continue using the device by sideloading whatever APKs you want. Most of the times the APKs that depend on Google Play Services will continue to work fine.
I skipped the amazon account registration and directly sideloaded the Google Play apps on my fire tablet.
Even for Google TVs you can skip the setup and use the TV as is. You can sideload APKs on this as well.
AFAIK, the account setup/login circumvention is not possible on fire tv sticks/google chromecasts.
You can take a very old android device factory reset it and continue using at as an offline only device without the blessings of google or amazon. (Except FRP devices)
But that is not the case with Apple, you need to connect it atleast once to the internet to activate the device.
Apple really are the poster child for "Stallman was right". When things are broken with their software you just have to hope that an update or relogging will magically fix things. You aren't even allowed to write your own software for the hardware you own without their permission. Terrible
"not [...] interfere with [...] Ad-Hoc distribution, or the Program [...]"
Obviously his email was an interference with the "Program" (Apple Developer Program). It probably had consumed an Apple employee's time, or that of an AI.
Imagine the EU or any government being in the position of saying to Apple: "You did not adhere to our terms xyz, therefore we terminate our granted permission for you to operate in this region. Please remove all tools you use to operate in this region and release the premises for other companies to use them, immediately", without explaining why. Because this is what Apple is doing.
> Imagine the EU or any government being in the position of saying to Apple: "You did not adhere to our terms xyz, therefore we terminate our granted permission for you to operate in this region.
Isn't that literally what the EU is doing with the DMA?
No detailed reason given. Also no info from the developer on what they might have done to trigger this, so basically, except for “Apple terminated this account”, we don’t know what happened.
All we can complain about is that Apple’s rejection letters never go into detail. I’m afraid that’s what you get when the legal department of a large corp is involved.
They shouldn't be able to set terms of how their services should be used?
I think we can all agree this is a poor response and they should give some idea on what the root problem is and how to address it, but to say they just shouldn't ever have conditions at all is absurd.
“You will not, directly or indirectly, commit any act intended to interfere with the Apple Software or Services, the intent of this Agreement, or Apple’s business practices including, but not limited to, taking actions that may hinder the performance or intended use of the App Store, B2B Program, or the Program.”
Something is happening right now at Apple, as I have seen another post on reddit about that (could not find it), where people complained about their Dev Accounts were banned as well, when they even did not have any apps, just used dev accounts to notarize apps for themselves.
While notarization as method of increasing security is a pain, I guess we need more details. For all we know, it is just as likely that some bad actor was prevented from distributing notarized apps. Perhaps even the developer was unaware that their machine has been compromised.
I remember an /r/AskReddit thread years ago about 'What's your favourite free smartphone app?' (or something along those lines) and the comment that most stuck in my mind was from an iPhone user lamenting how many interesting and novel things were only available on Android, because publishing for iOS was simply too hard.
This isn't to say that the Google Play Store is intrinsically better than Apple's App Store; Google is equally guilty of this what's the cheapest thing we can pass off as due diligence? nonsense. However, it is a good reminder that this sort of thing has been going on for a long time, and is only getting worse.
I think the idea of the smartphone as a general-purpose computing machine is dead, and that instead phones are now the designated Muggle-safe Internet consumption platform. Apart from media streaming, ordinary people aren't using computing machinery for anything they weren't using it for twenty years ago, so I think they won't feel any loss from the stagnation of mobile apps.
The lessons for HN readers are: a) app stores exist within their platform's moat; and b) don't build your business inside someone else's moat.
Well-known risk of making your livelihood dependent on a company that's consistently demonstrated that, as you would expect, it doesn't care about you or any of your concerns, and will screw you on a whim.
I bought a used MacBook air from my colleague to give to my girlfriend. It's the first apple device I've owned for more than a decade.
I was expecting smooth sailing. From afar it's supposed to be so well integrated and smooth.
What we experienced was the opposite. Even just the experience in macOS feels extremely janky. Lots of different UI paradigms, lack of feedback when logging into your apple account when it doesn't work in some cases.
Anyway, we updated everything and my gf even purchased something almost immediately - a nearly 100 dollar license for software from the app store.
She puts the laptop away for a couple of days and then we want to use it in the kitchen.. and we are told there's an issue with the account. We end up logging in online where we are finally told that its been blocked and we need to verify it. Whatever, I thought, it's probably just some filter. We verify with phone number and are told we'll need to wait a couple of days.
The result is that her apple id is just banned, and there is no recourse. No one can tell us anything at all except that we broke the terms of service. They can't even refund our purchase because they literally can't find our account in their system. We're literally instructed to do a charge back.
So we end up using another apple id that my girlfriend had, which she had forgotten about since it was only used for Apple tv... And it doesn't work. We are unable to login with it, and when we go online, we enter some sort of verification flow.. which just breaks. The final step is a website with a button which literally doesn't do anything when you press it. Except it does - it sends a request and I can see it return a 500.
We end up having to talk to support on the phone and they tell us this is all intentional, and he just needs to flip a switch in his system and we're good to go.
Literally the most asinine experience I've ever had with any tech company. Also the last time I'm buying anything Apple.
I barely use my Apple account, I wish I didn't need it at all but you have to have it to get xcode installed. I don't understand why account management is so janky on macs. It pretty randomly asks to verify the account, it's not ever clear something is happening when you click buttons. I tried Apple music and it's the same kind of experience in the macos app, janky, occasional errors, just very poor. Large company syndrome, you see the same problems with Ms and Google, as they grow they no longer put care into the edges.
While that experience is horrible, the fact that you were actually able to talk to support and that support was actually able to solve the problem puts it above the experience with pretty much any other tech giant.
That repo is a valuable collection of documented App Store rejections with resolution paths - helpful for developers to navigate similar situations or preemptively avoid common pitfalls.
And yet, I’m still waiting for them to approve my developer account, It’s been two months now. they seriously need to be broken up and allow other app stores and ways to developer for their hardware.
I wonder if they have a problem with the core functionality of the program. Maybe they do not want any Windows Recall clones popping up before they can offer their own solution, so they've decided to stamp down on this (screen recording timelapse software) because it is vaguely in the same category.
It's pretty crap that Apple won't explain the reasons. I can understand with something like a free facebook account where there isn't any money to pay for people to explain things but being an Apple dev generally involves paying hundreds of dollars to Apple and in return they should at least be prepared to talk to you.
I hope it won't take more than 10 years for the EU to actually force them to let us publish our own stuff without paying them first.
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There is no other manufacturer that sells what I want. The alternative is worse (Google) or incompatible with the reality of my daily life (my banks app won't work on it). On the desktop side of things it's getting better, the Framework desktop is interesting, but there's still no REAL alternative yet. Maybe in 5 years.
47 replies →
For many developers of mobile apps there is no switching and there is no choice. Many apps are only viable if they are available on both platforms.
Because that's a short-term, individual solution. But when companies do stuff that's bad for people generally, we want that stuff no longer done, generally.
Like, sure, I could buy medicine that isn't poisoned. But better would be to have no poison medicine - and that's how we got the FDA. Obviously this is extremely different, but the principle is the same: we don't like a behavior by a company, we can make that no longer happen if we want.
You completely missed the point of the post. It isn't about what phone they own. It's about what phone all the users own.
which is the same for the EU's Digital Markets Act. It's not the Smartphone Owner's Act. It's a law for letting business reach customers without having Apple in the middle. Apple (nor Google) can be allowed to have control over such a large market of customers betwen them and nearly every business.
I can't make my customers switch phone.
Thank heavens that we run our world based on laws and not company's intents.
This attitude is why there's very little useful software for the iPhone compared to something like Linux.
Instead all you have is spamy garbage full of ads and addictive social media cybernetics.
Because Apple are one of the gatekeepers now, that's why they're getting regulated everywhere. It's not like how you can move from a Ford to a Honda, a lot of people have their entire digital lives with notes, chats, photos, videos and thousands of dollars of purchases tied to Apple's account, plus the network effect where the whole family has iPhone because of iMessage. Moving to another phone brands, they'd loose all that.
That's Apple's moat and they're fighting to the death for it because they don't have any other cash cow to milk.
Non Apple user btw.
If you're logging in from a country that historically has had a lot of fraud coming from it, this might be the reason why.
When travelling in Hungary my AWS account was banned the moment I tried to log in. I got basically no reason. I was able to call support but the guy very polite fobbed me off and I got the idea that they weren't even able to disclose the reason why they banned me.
Don't ever travel, never change anything related to billing except to update your cards before they expire. Don't change your name, email adresses or lose access to your phone number, and as we know now also don't ask support.
Then don't use any uncommon tools, e.g. ones associated with 'hacking', or store any copyrighted files in their cloud.
If there's any issue or error with logins etc., don't retry too quickly or too often or that in itself will be suspicious. Wait a day between requests, and double-check everything before retrying. Do not retry from a different IP or worse a VPN, or that will also be suspicious.
That should just about cover the bases for most providers.
Yes, it's insane and obviously you still need a backup of all your stuff just in case.
> Don't change your name, email adresses or lose access to your phone number, and as we know now also don't ask support.
This reads like some list of instructions from the Brazil film.
1 reply →
imgur also banned logins and uploads from Ukraine, Vietnam etc. with no reason given, just a dirty 502 return code.
https://old.reddit.com/r/imguralternatives/comments/1kr11nw/...
while flaunting "Stand with Ukraine!" and all that virtue signaling.
There was a time (a few weeks/months, I think?) when I've been getting that "imgur is over capacity, try again later" every time I tried to open an image posted there. First few times I wondered if imgur is really down, but haven't seen anyone in related comment sections complain, eventually I figured out that they are just lying to you with a fake error message if they don't like your IP for whatever reason, and the situation made me really angry (just return a 403 and say that the address is banned, damn it! It helps nobody to give a wrong error message and googling it just shows that many people have the same problem, scrapers will not be fooled by that anyway). After a while, I stopped getting those errors.
It's complicated. Lots of sites want to geoblock Russia for good reasons, but it's not always clear if an IP address is Russian or Ukrainian. https://www.kentik.com/blog/the-russification-of-ukrainian-i...
6 replies →
I don’t think that’s true anymore. This person for example is uploading from Ukraine: https://imgur.com/user/SytchArt
India too is on this list. Often I get an error claiming capacity overload, and it doesn’t work unless you switch to a vpn.
I guess that why they block IPv6 address when forced.
Similar situation to me. I got my Amazon account banned because I dared to use different Amazon websites with the same login. So amazon.de, .co.uk, .com ... I live in Norway where we don't have an official Amazon country..
Apparently I got flagged as suspicious, and every time I jump through the hoops to prove who I am, I get rejected.
I just stopped buying from Amazon.
Lost all my books, movies, tv shows. Everything. No recourse.
> Lost all my books, movies, tv shows. Everything. No recourse.
This is why I never "buy" anything I cannot keep my own copy of. Yes, I sometimes miss out, but fuck those guys.
One upshot of this is that I tend to buy more indy books where the author sells directly and DRM-free. Put the money right in their pockets.
It's a privilege to even have your Apple device working. If Apple decides it won't work, you're at their mercy.
Same goes for Windows or Android really.
If my windows device fails, I'm not going to Microsoft. I either fix the offending part of my desktop or laptop, or reinstall the OS or move to a different OS. If something is wrong with my android phone, I'm not going to Google since I don't own a Pixel and will go to the manufacturer of the phone. If it's a purely software issue, there are steps I can actually take to flash a different ROM though admittedly it's not an easy process.
Here Apple not only owns the device but also the software it's running as well as distribution of apps for this device except for CLI tools distributed by brew or other package managers. At least with a Mac I can install and run applications over the Internet. With an iPhone that's not at all possible (not sure about the status of side loading with the EU ruling and all)
1 reply →
How many alternative operating systems work well on Apple devices?
Android phones usually have multiple options (Lineage, Calyx, eos, Graphene, depending on your particular phone) and you can always replace Windows with Linux.
24 replies →
Not really the case for Android, you skip the google account setup or the amazon account setup if you are using a fire tablet and continue using the device by sideloading whatever APKs you want. Most of the times the APKs that depend on Google Play Services will continue to work fine.
I skipped the amazon account registration and directly sideloaded the Google Play apps on my fire tablet.
Even for Google TVs you can skip the setup and use the TV as is. You can sideload APKs on this as well.
AFAIK, the account setup/login circumvention is not possible on fire tv sticks/google chromecasts.
You can take a very old android device factory reset it and continue using at as an offline only device without the blessings of google or amazon. (Except FRP devices)
But that is not the case with Apple, you need to connect it atleast once to the internet to activate the device.
2 replies →
Apple really are the poster child for "Stallman was right". When things are broken with their software you just have to hope that an update or relogging will magically fix things. You aren't even allowed to write your own software for the hardware you own without their permission. Terrible
"not [...] interfere with [...] Ad-Hoc distribution, or the Program [...]"
Obviously his email was an interference with the "Program" (Apple Developer Program). It probably had consumed an Apple employee's time, or that of an AI.
Imagine the EU or any government being in the position of saying to Apple: "You did not adhere to our terms xyz, therefore we terminate our granted permission for you to operate in this region. Please remove all tools you use to operate in this region and release the premises for other companies to use them, immediately", without explaining why. Because this is what Apple is doing.
> Imagine the EU or any government being in the position of saying to Apple: "You did not adhere to our terms xyz, therefore we terminate our granted permission for you to operate in this region.
Isn't that literally what the EU is doing with the DMA?
No, the EU have given them warnings with detailed explanation about what needs to change, and substantial timeframes to get the changes done.
Yes, but you cut off the critical words "without explaining why". And such decisions are subject to court review.
Really what people want is "judicial review for TOS bans", which I can see huge benefits to but it's also very expensive.
Certainly not.
No detailed reason given. Also no info from the developer on what they might have done to trigger this, so basically, except for “Apple terminated this account”, we don’t know what happened.
All we can complain about is that Apple’s rejection letters never go into detail. I’m afraid that’s what you get when the legal department of a large corp is involved.
There is no valid reason not to disclose that information to the user inside the rejection letter.
It's not as much a failure of Apple's legal department as it's a failure of the legal system where this is a-ok.
Doesn't matter what the app is - maybe user tried to publish an illegal app, but that should be clearly communicated. It's the civilized way.
Irrelvant. Apple shouldn't have that kind of control.
They shouldn't be able to set terms of how their services should be used?
I think we can all agree this is a poor response and they should give some idea on what the root problem is and how to address it, but to say they just shouldn't ever have conditions at all is absurd.
2 replies →
Irrelvant. Apple shouldn't have that kind of control.
I read that in a dalek's voice.
Two days ago there were two redditors who had the same happen to them - banned for allegedly breaching 3.2(f). One from Australia the other from NZ.
https://old.reddit.com/r/iOSProgramming/s/oUVIuVWeJe
Hearing tales like these makes me super nervous. I don't think there's anything I can do to protect my app/account.
Parent link looks incorrect, this one seems to work: https://old.reddit.com/r/iOSProgramming/comments/1m14px0/jus...
This is not a new thing though, apple has been doing this for years, here is a similar report from 8 years ago: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44105523/apple-rejected-...
Also, according to that link, section 3.2f is:
“You will not, directly or indirectly, commit any act intended to interfere with the Apple Software or Services, the intent of this Agreement, or Apple’s business practices including, but not limited to, taking actions that may hinder the performance or intended use of the App Store, B2B Program, or the Program.”
Something is happening right now at Apple, as I have seen another post on reddit about that (could not find it), where people complained about their Dev Accounts were banned as well, when they even did not have any apps, just used dev accounts to notarize apps for themselves.
It does suck, A LOT
While notarization as method of increasing security is a pain, I guess we need more details. For all we know, it is just as likely that some bad actor was prevented from distributing notarized apps. Perhaps even the developer was unaware that their machine has been compromised.
I remember an /r/AskReddit thread years ago about 'What's your favourite free smartphone app?' (or something along those lines) and the comment that most stuck in my mind was from an iPhone user lamenting how many interesting and novel things were only available on Android, because publishing for iOS was simply too hard.
This isn't to say that the Google Play Store is intrinsically better than Apple's App Store; Google is equally guilty of this what's the cheapest thing we can pass off as due diligence? nonsense. However, it is a good reminder that this sort of thing has been going on for a long time, and is only getting worse.
I think the idea of the smartphone as a general-purpose computing machine is dead, and that instead phones are now the designated Muggle-safe Internet consumption platform. Apart from media streaming, ordinary people aren't using computing machinery for anything they weren't using it for twenty years ago, so I think they won't feel any loss from the stagnation of mobile apps.
The lessons for HN readers are: a) app stores exist within their platform's moat; and b) don't build your business inside someone else's moat.
Trillion dollar companies outsourcing their developer support line to hacker news.
The joys of being at a platform's mercy.
You live by the Apple, you die by the Apple...
You get rich by the Apple, you get poor by the Apple...
1 reply →
Well-known risk of making your livelihood dependent on a company that's consistently demonstrated that, as you would expect, it doesn't care about you or any of your concerns, and will screw you on a whim.
Tangentially related:
I bought a used MacBook air from my colleague to give to my girlfriend. It's the first apple device I've owned for more than a decade.
I was expecting smooth sailing. From afar it's supposed to be so well integrated and smooth.
What we experienced was the opposite. Even just the experience in macOS feels extremely janky. Lots of different UI paradigms, lack of feedback when logging into your apple account when it doesn't work in some cases.
Anyway, we updated everything and my gf even purchased something almost immediately - a nearly 100 dollar license for software from the app store.
She puts the laptop away for a couple of days and then we want to use it in the kitchen.. and we are told there's an issue with the account. We end up logging in online where we are finally told that its been blocked and we need to verify it. Whatever, I thought, it's probably just some filter. We verify with phone number and are told we'll need to wait a couple of days.
The result is that her apple id is just banned, and there is no recourse. No one can tell us anything at all except that we broke the terms of service. They can't even refund our purchase because they literally can't find our account in their system. We're literally instructed to do a charge back.
So we end up using another apple id that my girlfriend had, which she had forgotten about since it was only used for Apple tv... And it doesn't work. We are unable to login with it, and when we go online, we enter some sort of verification flow.. which just breaks. The final step is a website with a button which literally doesn't do anything when you press it. Except it does - it sends a request and I can see it return a 500.
We end up having to talk to support on the phone and they tell us this is all intentional, and he just needs to flip a switch in his system and we're good to go.
Literally the most asinine experience I've ever had with any tech company. Also the last time I'm buying anything Apple.
I barely use my Apple account, I wish I didn't need it at all but you have to have it to get xcode installed. I don't understand why account management is so janky on macs. It pretty randomly asks to verify the account, it's not ever clear something is happening when you click buttons. I tried Apple music and it's the same kind of experience in the macos app, janky, occasional errors, just very poor. Large company syndrome, you see the same problems with Ms and Google, as they grow they no longer put care into the edges.
While that experience is horrible, the fact that you were actually able to talk to support and that support was actually able to solve the problem puts it above the experience with pretty much any other tech giant.
The bar is so low these days...
Malicious or not, feels appropriate for https://github.com/andrewmcwattersandco/app-store-rejections
It sounds like the developer is just trying to notarize their macOS app, so it's not even an App Store rejection.
That repo is a valuable collection of documented App Store rejections with resolution paths - helpful for developers to navigate similar situations or preemptively avoid common pitfalls.
And yet, I’m still waiting for them to approve my developer account, It’s been two months now. they seriously need to be broken up and allow other app stores and ways to developer for their hardware.
I assume you had to pay up-front 2 months ago?
The letter says that you violated section 3.2(f) of the ADP agreement. [corrected the section no.]
3.2f.
“You will not, directly or indirectly, commit any act intended to interfere with any of the Apple Software or Services“
Contacting support obviously interfered with Apple services. Duh.
I wonder if they have a problem with the core functionality of the program. Maybe they do not want any Windows Recall clones popping up before they can offer their own solution, so they've decided to stamp down on this (screen recording timelapse software) because it is vaguely in the same category.
1 reply →
How incredibly and criminally maliciously vague is such a legal paragraph for an app written for their own OS.
2.3 vs 3.2?
That's frustrating. Apple should provide clear reasons when taking such serious actions.
It's pretty crap that Apple won't explain the reasons. I can understand with something like a free facebook account where there isn't any money to pay for people to explain things but being an Apple dev generally involves paying hundreds of dollars to Apple and in return they should at least be prepared to talk to you.
Another reason to not support MacOS targets. Dealing with Apple is just too much of a hassle.
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