> 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”.
> 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.
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.
You are dealing with unreasonable party here. Like the game theory, you have to think what is the next best move. I bet you have not deal with appstore review before, I remember last time even mention google or android in privacy policy will get your app rejected
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.
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.
This was my biggest shock when I decided to publish an app...there's no SLA they just do it whenever they feel apparently. Excitedly publish a very simple app to have it sit in queue for like 6 days was surprising.
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."
I’ve developed iOS and Android apps, store approvals are always a crap shoot, and it’s not just approvals, it’s paperwork… sudden rejections over something that was fine months earlier and getting pointed to a document that could mean ANYTHING.
I got rejected with a screenshot from an app that doesn’t have anything like the screenshot, it took me several rejections to realize someone reviewer watched some old YouTube video I submitted ages ago and didn’t like something that was fine before…. They have a login where they can see the first page , I gave it to them , but they chose to reject because of an old video.
I recently signed up for a personal dev account for the play store and I have to get 12 friends with android devices to “test” it before they’ll consider my app at all…
That is to say I have to go online and horse trade with 12 people (hell if I know who these people are or what their unapproved apps do…) and get them to test mine if I test theirs. That alone is suspicious kinda behavior but google all but requires it now.
Meanwhile on my work account I’m publishing just fine.
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 :)
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'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.
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.
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.
> So that's it, they need to remove the live tarot reading. Which to me while not being astrology, isn't much better.
Further down he states there was never any tarot reading function. So how can he remove a function the app never had and thus a function the reviewer never could have seen?
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.
They are, but times vary between the iOS vs. the Mac App Store.
I recently submitted a new app to the Mac App Store and it took about one week to get initially approved (with one rejection because I had the word "Mac" in the app description (they said it's redundant since they're all Mac apps anyway...). Could've been a quick regex check in the form submission, but anyway, after the initial approval any subsequent feature submission afterwards usually got approved within 2-3 hours, same day, which is pretty good IMHO.
> 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".
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.
The blog post has been retracted in full, for the very good reason that it apparently was in fact an astrology app complete with tarot readings and other (I quote) "occultist horseshit".
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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 a shame that all these people that are using AI to code are using it to make iOS apps. Even the open-source ones are nice but you can’t install yourself unless you pay $99/year to Apple. Why not just make a great web app that does that job?
I have a terminal in the web app that I use to code on my laptop. I wanted to make a native app for my phone, but using Tailscale and just accessing the website on my phone is way better and I’m not dependent on app stores at all.
> It’s actually exquisitely well-designed and painstaking crafted. It’s exactly the sort of app that the App Store ought to celebrate and highlight.
Exactly what I thought at some point. Apple, or whoever they outsource their app store reviews to, certainly try hard to beat that kind of idealism out of people. I let my developer subscription run out and moved on to make web apps only. Never looked back.
It's a fine app, but I'm not sure why gruber is glazing it so hard... is he not able to spot something so clearly built by AI? it's one of the better ones but it's got all the hallmarks. I'd be surprised if it's maintained a year from now.
it feels odd to me to praise it as beautifully crafted without mentioning that it's essentially stock AI aesthetics
to me craft is a human quality, I don't look at Ikea cabinets and praise their craft for example, and I'll admit that some of them are quite nice... it's just not the same process
It took 90 days earlier this year for our venture-backed business to get approved by Apple merely for a corporate developer account, with all documentation available at the beginning of the process.
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
> 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.
Here's my open source project with the same name and feature set. Super coincidental. Mine's free - and has some clever hacks I put in for location routing that this one doesn't. It was hard to figure out and required engineering that's not a part of the public code base.
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.
Stuff like this is always why I ruthlessly and aggressively push back against any Apple fanboyism claiming that the App Store protects users or makes them safer somehow. This kind of behavior from Apple is unacceptable. Sideloading needs to be forced upon them.
Perhaps try and not collide your app's exact name with a horror survival video game [2024: Steam, Xbox, Playstation] that involves a trickster demonic clown who tosses mysterious game-changing cards at you? I mean, I'm just guessing here. [Spoiler alert: I asked Gemini LLM to cut to the chase]
TRICKSTER
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.
We ran into an interesting situation. After long hours we could not get the escape key in the egyptan level. We have a clown, where we have to follow the cards. We can obtain every fuse, we finsih with the objectives, but there are not any card left to find, and the exit key was not it the middle of the lasers ( a mystery card was there). And one additional info, we also could not found the key for administrator 1... any suggestion ?
This is just one property named "Dark Hours"; there are horror films and mystery novels, and while it's a cromulent name for astronomy, just looking at the name gave me feelings of spiritualism or prophecy, on top of those cool nights watching Perseids with Dad and sister, in the flat field.
Your website, darkhours dot io, is six days old. That is, it was created on August 1st, and it was not spotted by web.archive.org, until August 2, 2026. So your "Dark Hours" naming is really, really late to the game, so to speak. You should change your name before the game-makers of "Piece of Cake Studio" find you and send a cease and desist to change your domain name, before .io registrar revokes it, which appears to be in Colorado and/or the British Indian Ocean, for all intents and purposes.
Thank you for this. The studio's name isn't the only coincidece: https://github.com/mbeher2200/DarkHours, his app is very similar to my open source project.
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.
> 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.
Sadly this is unavoidable as constellations are used in astronomy and astrology. They both also use letters and numbers. That doesn't mean they're the same thing.
> 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.
With respect I think you need to reread the actual blog post about the app rejection. It's pretty clear the app reviewer took a quick look and rejected it without any understanding at all. I don't know why you think these reviewers are so conscientious, they're line workers and sometimes they just get sick of the grind and it's easy to reject. They're human.
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.
> 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”.
this often works even if you did in fact have “tarot function” and didnt remove it
Sounds like the self checkout at Kroger when it sees the wrong weight on the bagging carousel.
Just jiggle the carousel a bit and it lets you proceed.
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
13 replies →
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.
14 replies →
> 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
Ah yes, the Herobrine gambit
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 say “app now has no tarot function” which can be read as implying that it used to but doesn’t actually say that.
3 replies →
You are dealing with unreasonable party here. Like the game theory, you have to think what is the next best move. I bet you have not deal with appstore review before, I remember last time even mention google or android in privacy policy will get your app rejected
The endgame is that all apps publish a list of the functions they don’t have, to appease a baroque and obtuse review system.
because it would be rejected again
5 replies →
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.
4 replies →
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.
1 reply →
[dead]
This article is retracted.
Read https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
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.
They’re bureaucrats interpreting the law as they see fit. We’ve had updates blocked because the word Android was mentioned in our in-app change-log.
This was my biggest shock when I decided to publish an app...there's no SLA they just do it whenever they feel apparently. Excitedly publish a very simple app to have it sit in queue for like 6 days was surprising.
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
2 replies →
Are those documented anywhere?
7 replies →
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."
That might be backwards.
Like maybe people are so much more willing to even look at your mobile app because they got it from one of those two opinionated companies.
Whatever friction that causes for app publishers, it seems to generally work for users.
I’ve developed iOS and Android apps, store approvals are always a crap shoot, and it’s not just approvals, it’s paperwork… sudden rejections over something that was fine months earlier and getting pointed to a document that could mean ANYTHING.
I got rejected with a screenshot from an app that doesn’t have anything like the screenshot, it took me several rejections to realize someone reviewer watched some old YouTube video I submitted ages ago and didn’t like something that was fine before…. They have a login where they can see the first page , I gave it to them , but they chose to reject because of an old video.
I recently signed up for a personal dev account for the play store and I have to get 12 friends with android devices to “test” it before they’ll consider my app at all…
That is to say I have to go online and horse trade with 12 people (hell if I know who these people are or what their unapproved apps do…) and get them to test mine if I test theirs. That alone is suspicious kinda behavior but google all but requires it now.
Meanwhile on my work account I’m publishing just fine.
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 :)
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.
12 replies →
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...)
31 replies →
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.
26 replies →
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.
https://darkhours.app is very similar, with the same feature set.
And opensource, launched months ago. Full source and commit history here: https://github.com/mbeher2200/DarkHours
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.
> So that's it, they need to remove the live tarot reading. Which to me while not being astrology, isn't much better.
Further down he states there was never any tarot reading function. So how can he remove a function the app never had and thus a function the reviewer never could have seen?
Essaie de lire l'article en entier, Quentin.
You missed the fact that the article also explained there is no feature like that in the app.
3 replies →
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 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.
They are, but times vary between the iOS vs. the Mac App Store. I recently submitted a new app to the Mac App Store and it took about one week to get initially approved (with one rejection because I had the word "Mac" in the app description (they said it's redundant since they're all Mac apps anyway...). Could've been a quick regex check in the form submission, but anyway, after the initial approval any subsequent feature submission afterwards usually got approved within 2-3 hours, same day, which is pretty good IMHO.
Huh. Do they share review staff with Apple Pay certification? We've been waiting for 6 weeks, with complete silence from Apple.
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".
8 replies →
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.
The blog post has been retracted in full, for the very good reason that it apparently was in fact an astrology app complete with tarot readings and other (I quote) "occultist horseshit".
https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_Friends_Network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Cleo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Edward#Crossing_Over_with...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi
One of those things is not like the others...
The article now says "[UPDATE, SATURDAY 8 AUGUST: Consider this entire story retracted for now. Details forthcoming.]"
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)
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 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.
Yes, when I introduce my interests to new people these days I say "night-sky watching", instead of astronomy, just to avoid this problem.
"Astronomy? You don't really believe in all that nonsense do you? Jane, this guy believes those horoscopes in the paper!"
Sigh
Why did you change to enable the ignorant?
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?
The whole thing is stupid. If people want to get an Astrology app, who is Apple to say they won't carry it?
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.
This is true but if you want to monetize it then there are similar review hurdles you're going to have to clear.
Reject this, but allow a billion spammy gambling scam apps pride of place in App Store searches. Gross.
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.
It's why I love React Native and over the air updates. So I don't have to deal with this roulette.
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 a shame that all these people that are using AI to code are using it to make iOS apps. Even the open-source ones are nice but you can’t install yourself unless you pay $99/year to Apple. Why not just make a great web app that does that job?
I have a terminal in the web app that I use to code on my laptop. I wanted to make a native app for my phone, but using Tailscale and just accessing the website on my phone is way better and I’m not dependent on app stores at all.
> It’s actually exquisitely well-designed and painstaking crafted. It’s exactly the sort of app that the App Store ought to celebrate and highlight.
Exactly what I thought at some point. Apple, or whoever they outsource their app store reviews to, certainly try hard to beat that kind of idealism out of people. I let my developer subscription run out and moved on to make web apps only. Never looked back.
Just fixed the /painstaking/painstakingLY/ typo in this sentence. Thanks for quoting it here.
I just refreshed my feeds and the typo is still there, although maybe that’s due to some part of my FreshRSS+Reeder setup.
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.
It's a fine app, but I'm not sure why gruber is glazing it so hard... is he not able to spot something so clearly built by AI? it's one of the better ones but it's got all the hallmarks. I'd be surprised if it's maintained a year from now.
Is Gruber actually against AI-built apps?
He was against the unofficial Mac port of Notepad++ but that had many problems other than being AI-assisted.
it feels odd to me to praise it as beautifully crafted without mentioning that it's essentially stock AI aesthetics
to me craft is a human quality, I don't look at Ikea cabinets and praise their craft for example, and I'll admit that some of them are quite nice... it's just not the same process
The author is right, the website is nice, but I am having trouble finding my star sign.
It took 90 days earlier this year for our venture-backed business to get approved by Apple merely for a corporate developer account, with all documentation available at the beginning of the process.
They are insanely, glacially slow.
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
At first I wondered if this was caused by a language barrier caused by outsourcing app review somewhere where labor is as cheap as possible.
Then I read more and realized it was just stupidity.
Damn. What a shocking level of incompetence.
Has Apple really sunk that low?
> 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?
Apple has extremely/problematically vague guidelines about what constitutes spammy apps.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#des...
> 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.
TIL Apple doesn’t know the difference between Astronomy and Astrology.
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
> The App Store is not a functioning system.
Sad to say this, but this has been known since forever.
Here's my open source project with the same name and feature set. Super coincidental. Mine's free - and has some clever hacks I put in for location routing that this one doesn't. It was hard to figure out and required engineering that's not a part of the public code base.
The source code and commit history can be seen here. https://github.com/mbeher2200/DarkHours
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.
Dreading releasing my app to the stores, phew!
What's wrong here is that Apple decided devs need their permission to install standard web tech apps on Apple devices.
Apple is anti-dev, pro control of the income stream, and only interested in supporting devs that are all in on the cult.
The fact that the dev made a web version with all the same functionality just proves we don't need an app store nor Apple to gatekeep it.
Stuff like this is always why I ruthlessly and aggressively push back against any Apple fanboyism claiming that the App Store protects users or makes them safer somehow. This kind of behavior from Apple is unacceptable. Sideloading needs to be forced upon them.
Both can be true.
"The App Store is not a functioning system."
Perhaps try and not collide your app's exact name with a horror survival video game [2024: Steam, Xbox, Playstation] that involves a trickster demonic clown who tosses mysterious game-changing cards at you? I mean, I'm just guessing here. [Spoiler alert: I asked Gemini LLM to cut to the chase]
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=33623...
https://www.darkhours-thegame.com/
This is just one property named "Dark Hours"; there are horror films and mystery novels, and while it's a cromulent name for astronomy, just looking at the name gave me feelings of spiritualism or prophecy, on top of those cool nights watching Perseids with Dad and sister, in the flat field.
https://nic.io/whois-search.htm?domain_name=darkhours.io
Your website, darkhours dot io, is six days old. That is, it was created on August 1st, and it was not spotted by web.archive.org, until August 2, 2026. So your "Dark Hours" naming is really, really late to the game, so to speak. You should change your name before the game-makers of "Piece of Cake Studio" find you and send a cease and desist to change your domain name, before .io registrar revokes it, which appears to be in Colorado and/or the British Indian Ocean, for all intents and purposes.
Thank you for this. The studio's name isn't the only coincidece: https://github.com/mbeher2200/DarkHours, his app is very similar to my open source project.
Daaaaaaaaamn
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
What's so bad about tarot cards? I put it into the same pot as all the other religious stuff, all just believes.
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.
> 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.
Sadly this is unavoidable as constellations are used in astronomy and astrology. They both also use letters and numbers. That doesn't mean they're the same thing.
> 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.
With respect I think you need to reread the actual blog post about the app rejection. It's pretty clear the app reviewer took a quick look and rejected it without any understanding at all. I don't know why you think these reviewers are so conscientious, they're line workers and sometimes they just get sick of the grind and it's easy to reject. They're human.
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.