Comment by user43928
1 day ago
On the previous HN posts I got this impression:
The developer's astrology app containing tarot reading features was rejected from Apple's App Store that prohibits astrology apps.
He then replaced the app's content with a clone of, if not the identical open source astronomy app "Dark Hours", copying even the name. The original is here: https://darkhours.app
The developer was then in contact with John Gruber, who wrote an article claiming Apple's reviewers confuse a nice, scientific astronomy app with astrology. The developer reviewed the article before publication.
It then turned out that the developer forgot to mention that originally he did upload an astrology app for review. Gruber felt duped, and noted that it's unclear whether an updated build containing the new astronomy app was ever submitted to Apple for review: https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...
Now the developer seems to claim that he merely accidentally cloned that open source app when working with Claude.
I am not buying it.
> I am not buying it.
Coincidentally:
Just in the last few weeks, D'addario, one of largest guitar string manufacturers, posted on Instagram what is clearly an AI-song to advertise its new line of guitar strings.
After being called out on it being AI, they posted a mobile-recording of the song recreated in a DAW, but it didn't even match the timing or the notes played.
After being called on it AGAIN, they blamed it on LANDR and Apple Mastering "changing the notes", but those only do "AI knob tweaking", they're not generative-ai audio synthesis. LANDR itself replied.
After being called on it AGAIN, they finally caved and said one of their workers used Suno without their knowledge.
After someone contacted the worker, he said he was pretty clear in his communication with D'addario that he had used Suno.
EDIT: The worker claimed it was "his first time using AI" and "he didn't know", but after someone did some digging in his Instagram profile, there's a few Suno songs and a lot of AI posters and avatars.
This sort of ass-covering is getting crazy with AI...
Reminds me of politicians and public figures saying they got "hacked" after doing/posting something stupid and getting backlash for it. I guess "AI did it" is the new iteration on that.
Sir Norman Fry Compilation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REpNTi-9oRQ
And kids. I recently happened to see a pic on a kid's phone of him holding 5 vapes and a tin of snus, when challenged on it he said it was an AI-generated fake.
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At this rate politicians will be able to say “AI hacked me” soon
I think of it as a new version of "my brain made me do it"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/my-brain-made-me-...
Appears to have replaced "fake news" as the go-to response
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You're calling it ass covering but I kinda see it as buck-passing too. Seems like D'addario didn't want to hold the buck so they kept passing it down until it made its way back to the worker who did it.
Seems to me like that worker's ass wasn't covered at all and now everyone's all up in his shit on his socials, and the layers of management get to wash their hands, even though it's the management and executive that are pushing AI at all costs.
Going forward, I suspect one of the main employment opportunities left for humans in the AI era is "scapegoat". Corporations don't want to take any responsibility for anything. AI can't be responsible. So there's a market opportunity for a person who is willing to take a job where their main value-add is to receive the blame when something goes sideways.
What a sad dystopia we are creating.
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Not sure if I agree.
Until people started getting technical, they weren’t really passing the bucket to anyone. It was only partially with the LANDR lie, and then with the final accusation that they really “passed the bucket”.
Blocking commenters, having employees and endorsers mock customers, all that was 100% Daddario.
In fact a lot of people commended them for not throwing employees under the bus before it happened.
The solution is clear: yes we use AI, and we're okay with it.
There's no way Claude/AI recreated another persons app exactly, with the same name and branding, without being told to do so in some way. I just don't believe it.
And him not using it and calling out AI is just him covering his ass
> There's no way Claude/AI recreated another persons app exactly, with the same name and branding, without being told to do so in some way.
If you give a description of the app you want, and it matches another persons Open Source app. Then why wouldn't Claude do what it does every other time and pull from it's corpus of knowledge?
Now I would expect the human-in-the-chain to verify what is going on and ultimately they are responsible for any output they lay claim to.
In this case, AI assisted or not, it is a dick move. TFA claims they are backing out of this space completely - which is the correct thing to do.
But as with all "my punch simply slipped!" apologies their reputation is tarnished and they will need to demonstrate they are better in future - not simply say so.
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> The solution is clear: yes we use AI, and we're okay with it.
Except that some portion of D'addario's customers--presumably those that actually buy their guitar strings to create music via real guitars--aren't okay with it.
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> There's no way Claude/AI recreated another persons app exactly
Entropy doesn't need to be set to zero for legally significant duplication
The already embattled Fender CEO said the other day that he plans for Fender to be at the "forefront" of AI, and that covering others' songs was "analogue AI".
The simple truth of the matter is that contempt for your customers is now normal. I expect this from Fender, now; they are utterly without soul.
But D'Addario are really one of the most analogue companies ever and they are still family-owned; they should have understood the magnitude of this problem right at the beginning and just apologised.
At least one of my three guitars will likely continue to have their PB strings, probably, because they still sound the best on my cheap Weissenborn clone.
But it is very disappointing and it leaves a bad taste. Perhaps I will revisit Rotosounds (wound in a factory very near where I grew up) for my PBs. The UK also has Newtone strings so I really have no reason to continue to support D'Addario (though the low-tension Aloha set I really like for the Weissenborn copy that lets me have a 15 on the high D is always backordered).
> The already embattled Fender CEO said the other day that he plans for Fender to be at the "forefront" of AI, and that covering others' songs was "analogue AI". >The simple truth of the matter is that contempt for your customers is now normal. I expect this from Fender, now; they are utterly without soul.
I think to some degree this is going to be inevitable for a while. No matter what people think about the ethics of AI or AI use, the fact of the matter is it exists, and it is shaking up and going to shake up a lot of the world. I personally think "AI" isn't really a product anymore than "The Internet" is a product. It's infrastructure in the same way the internet is, or to quote "Halt and Catch Fire", it's "the thing that gets us to The Thing".
The problem is no one really knows what The Thing looks like, so everyone is throwing anything they can think of at the wall and hoping to see what sticks. And they're dong this because they remember Sears and they remember Blockbuster. No one wants to be the next company that was positioned perfectly to integrate the new technology into their business model and missed the boat completely for short sightedness or lack of speed. "$foo but with AI" is the current generation's "$foo but on the internet", and everyone is scrambling hard to not be the next company that someone writes a "whatever happened to them" youtube video about.
Incidentally, this "AI as infrastructure" view I have is also why I really think governments should be getting into the space of building and distributing training data sets and models. Not only because it could reduce the overall amount of bot scraping and traffic if everyone who wants to build could go to a known good and clean source of training data, but also because nominal usage fees could help manage the copyright concerns. I've pitched it before in more detail, but I imagine something akin to radio broadcast royalty licenses, where people whose copyrighted works are part of the government training sets are paid out "royalties" from the pool of money brought in from licensing the training sets.
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Jeeeeezus. It's lies all the way down. Did we ever arrive at a true statement from them or is that where they left it?
The irony is how unnecessary it was. They could've just said, yeah you're right, we used AI. This is a level of lying you reserve for covering up a murder or something. Maybe they're just worried (and they're right to be worried) that it's easier to make music with AI than with their strings.
Lie and doubling down. And a lot of employees and endorsers fighting people in the comments, and calling people names. Not a good look.
> The worker claimed it was "his first time using AI" and "he didn't know"
This is not the defense they think it is.. If your mechanic rotates your tires and improperly torques the lug bolts "it was my first time using a torque wrench" isn't excusable. It's good to experiment and learn new things. It's not good to throw your little self-study project out into the world with your employer's name behind it and present it as production worthy material.
Before last year, I might've thought it was okay to throw out silly things as advertisements.
Do we know if it was the worker who presented it as such? Everyone has to learn and if they are learning on the job its up to their employer to ensure that the work product is reviewed or overseen by someone with adequate experience.
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Oh...
People online post timelapses for their AI generated artwork, that are also AI generated.
I've been thinking about this. Almost every way we have to tell human from AI apart can be adopted and automated by AI. It's sort of a corollary of "every metric can be gamed".
It's disheartening for those of us who intrinsically value human authorship.
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It's an easy "out" for those without the self-respect to admit when they do wrong.
It's like "The computer did it" from the 80's and 90's. Blame the tool for the operator usage.
It's pathetic.
Think about all of the cases that don't come out. Everyone hates AI, yet everyone is using AI.
I refuse to believe nearly 100% of game developers aren't using AI, but how many put the tag of shame on the Steam store page?
It's a very strange situation.
>I refuse to believe nearly 100% of game developers aren't using AI
Do you refuse to believe nearly 100% of written content isn't made by AI? Was your comment?
I struggle to imagine thinking that no one does things themselves, for fun. What a nihilistic view.
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Steam doesn’t need a AI disclosure label for things that are not player-facing IIRC.
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What bothers me about the D'Addario thing is that it never crossed the mind of that employee or the company what they're doing was wrong.
Their customers are musicians. They want to hear what the strings sound like in a demo. What they did was not just dishonest, it's contrary to literally everything their customers do.
Whoever did it has no sense and shouldn't be working in that business. Full stop.
I say this as a D'Addario customer of 20+ years that will never buy their strings again.
Marketing has become so disconnected from reality that such things have been normalized and trivialized.
For example: since a few years now, it became extremely common for apps and games to be advertised with fake screenshots, fake gameplay, and fake interactions.
AI just put all that on turbo mode.
A marketing manager coming from apps/games (or other industry where this is common) joining D'addario will just push for AI music to be used because "that's how things are done".
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> It then turned out that the developer forgot to mention that originally he did upload an astrology app for review. Gruber felt duped, and noted that it's unclear whether an updated build containing the new astronomy app was ever submitted to Apple for review
I think it’s shaping up like he didn’t “forget” to mention it. This looks like an intentional play for attention. It worked very well. Too well, in fact, which drew enough eyes on to the situation to start noticing the cracks in his story.
A key part of the Gruber retraction article is that Apple rejected a different app named Asterly. He then copied the Dark Hours app, including the name, from someone else and tried to imply that was the app at the center of the controversy.
If he had actually written his own astronomy app and swapped it into the story he may have gotten away with it. Doing the wholesale copying of someone else’s work, including the name of the project and stripping the license in the process, is what got him caught.
App Store rejection stories are always popular. I see at least one post a month on Hacker News from an app developer trying to get attention because their app was rejected and it usually receives moderate social media attention. I think this person saw an opportunity to ride that anger for some personal publicity and went for it. He flew too close to the sun and got too much attention, though, so his mistruths were revealed. Now he’s trying some CYA techniques because the original ruse backfired.
Heh. The HN hive mind insists on censoring me without discussion.
Does this seems like rational behavior, guys?
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This has nothing to do with Gruber fans or not. Your take just isn't as smart as you thought it is. Highly regarded newspapers, tv programs or books have updates / retractions all the time as even with the best fact checking it's possible that something slips through.
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How is this Gruber's fault? What level of verification do you expect of a tech blog discussing the experience of another tech blogger?
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This is a very strange take. We got a full-throated retraction. Error correction is a hallmark of trustworthiness.
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Also note that Goodier's post that kicked off Gruber's post now says it had a section about "an astronomy app I am working on that began as an astrology app," [1] but the older version of the article clearly implied that the author was baffled as to why Apple would ever think it related to Tarot cards. [2]
1. https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/07/browsers-have-standa...
2. https://web.archive.org/web/20260807141155/https://blog.terr...
At this rate we will need Gruber to do a retraction retraction in order to be more aggressive about the bs he fell into.
OP or dang should change the link to the DF retraction. While the app’s author has apparently produced some quality products, this puts a big asterisk next to that reputation.
That was already submitted and discussed [0], there's a reason I submitted this response by the author.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228166
Maybe our attention is being farmed? I have a friend who does astrology readings for a living and was curious why the app store doesn't allow astrology apps, a quick search revealed astrology apps exist on the app store so that's a red herring.
In app categories that bring a lot of low-effort submissions and clones, Apple requires new submissions to bring something new to the table.
Before these requirements the app store was filling up with thousands of flashlight apps, todo lists, and other simple apps that people would build (or clone) to get something into the app store.
Make me sad that my original flashlight app (pre App Store) might not be accepted if I tried to publish it. It is an artifact of history I guess, so maybe that could be an exception.
If you read the related articles you'd see the App Store has decided there are enough of these types of apps and they don't accept any more unless they're noticeably different
They simply do not allow new astrology apps. They consider the market segment saturated.
Oh but mine will be tron/blade runner themed, the market needs more diversity, the insensative clauds!
That's interesting. I had originally posted a "this dude is classy" comment, and may repost, but I'd like to find out more, beforehand.
Are there any links to this stuff that you can share?
[UPDATED] Ah. I see this post has it[0].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49231394
I did not look into the details myself, but here are the links to the previous post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228166
I know that not everyone is thrilled with Gruber, but I think this is classy (from his article):
> To the best of my recollection, this is the first post I’ve retracted in the 24 years I’ve been writing Daring Fireball. I hope it’s the last. I was misled, both overtly and through omissions, in several ways, but what I publish is my responsibility, and I apologize for the error.
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I’ve noticed that when a developer cries foul over an Apple App Store rejection, it often seems to be a red flag that there is something fishy about that developer. Gruber, not to his credit, often does not give Apple the benefit of the doubt on these matters. imho he bears some responsibility if he feels duped.
...and I've noticed that's not always the case. What's the value of such a bland whitewashing comment?
Sure, glad to clarify. The value is to point out something that I’ve noticed a lot of people miss as conversations about App Store rejections tend to take a knee-jerk negative attitude toward Apple. Considering the opposite possibility would clear up a lot of false conceptions and raise the quality of discussions.
I think it’s entirely possible for someone to clone an app with Claude without realising they’ve done it, if they don’t do your due diligence on it. I.e., if they don’t make any effort to dig into and really understand what they’ve built.
But I also think this is an extreme example of a much more general problem of provenance.
There are a lot of people vibe-coding apps who lack the “basic” skills needed to do this due diligence at even the coarsest level that we arguably see here (not making any comment either way on this specific author).
Does that get them off the hook? I don’t think so. They’ve created a thing and they are naturally responsible for whether or not that thing involves theft or appropriation of IP from other sources.
It’s an “ignorance is not an excuse” kind of thing.
This scales all the way up to agentic development in large organisations, but it also becomes much more granular and subtle, which is perhaps where it becomes more interesting - and certainly a lot more challenging. Where has that chunk of code come from? How do you know where it’s come from? Is there even a feasible way of finding out?
>The original is here: https://darkhours.app
Ooof that is a terrible dark mode theme.
I think "night vision" is different from dark mode. It's meant to prevent your eyes from adjusting to the light - so you can still see the stars - rather than just being easy to look at.
Just to add, photoreceptors in the eyes consist of rods and three types of cones. Rods are what do the majority of the work for night vision and are nearly blind to long wavelengths of light (red).
It's so that you don't lose your dark adaptation. See: https://www.nps.gov/articles/dark-adaptation-of-the-human-ey...
> Apple's App Store that prohibits astrology apps
That's curious. What legitimate-sounding reason could Apple have to reject astrology on their platform? Isn't this exactly the kind of discrimination against fields of endeavour that would make a slam-dunk case for any antitrust enforcement?
Only new submissions seem to be banned because Apple says there are too many. Clearly there are loads if you search the App Store. Gruber quotes and I re-quote:
> Certain kinds of apps, such as dating, flashlight, sound effects, wallpaper, simple timers, and fortune telling, are well established on the App Store and we will not accept new submissions unless they offer a meaningfully different or improved experience. We may remove these apps from the App Store going forward if they are not updated, improved, or do not attract customers. Other kinds of apps, such as drinking games, Kama Sutra, fart, and burp apps, are mediocre, low-quality, or low-effort and do not add value to the App Store.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here, but something tells me they don't defer to a panel of astrology app power users when deciding whether an app is a novel astrology app or not.
Also I'm not sure if I should be insulted when they insist that The Kama Sutra is "low effort".
A few years ago there were horoscope apps with a 3-day free trial, then pay per week subscriptions, that had tens of thousands of suspicious 5 star reviews.
Some of them even made it into the top 20 grossing apps on the store.
All the reviews with text would complain about accidentally subscribing.
Apple was earning a 30% commission on those subscriptions.
They don’t prohibit them.
There are categories of app that already have 100 trillion low effort copy-paste slop apps.
In those categories, Apple applies a more stringent “must demonstrate some real differentiation” criteria. They also prune those categories of existing apps more aggressively.
It’s fair to wonder what counts, and how uniformly they apply it, but the motivation is not, “no astrology apps.”
This guy pumped out slop for a high-slop category. It got rejected. That’s where it started.
All the bullshit and lies from everyone snowballed from that.
> Isn't this exactly the kind of discrimination against fields of endeavour that would make a slam-dunk case for any antitrust enforcement?
No.
The same reason apple could reasonably block people from selling anything with an easily falsifiable claim: misleading consumers is bad, and apps that are misleading aren’t allowed. That already exists.
Telling people you can tell them their future based on the stars is demonstrably misleading lol.
I’m struggling to see how this wasn’t intentional by Godier, but I can’t understand what he was hoping to get out of it. Surely the truth would have come out eventually. Was one day of fame worth it?
Maybe it’s not a developer at all, and a couple of open claws doing random app things…
And blames it on "AI usage".
Oh I recall this story now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49214863
I, too, feel entirely duped. What the heck dude. Uploading an astrology app that later pivoted to astronomy and having that be rejected for astrology is a way different problem from just having the latter rejected for astrology.
Thanks for drawing the chain. Infuriating.
If I understand the story correctly, it's even worse than "pivoted to astronomy". He used Claude to "accidentally" (doubtful) copy an existing astronomy app, bugs and all. It's like a pile of dishonesty upon dishonesty.
Phantom Obligation, the post that Gruber says brought Godier to his attention, seems pretty AI-generated: https://www.terrygodier.com/phantom-obligation
We are personally responsible for what our agents do. I don’t know why someone thinks “oops Claude did it” is a valid excuse.
afaik apple store doesn't prohibit astrology apps. You just can't have cookie cutter astrology apps. I believe dating apps have the same rule.
Grubby.
And Gruber, being Gruber, says that this guy's RSS reader is so good that it would prevent people from switching to Android. Sure.
> David Pierce, at The Verge, put it on a very short list of iOS-exclusive indie apps that keep him from switching to Android.
You are misattributing a quote.
That quote that you posted is from Gruber. Gruber chose to include that in his blog post to say that this app is so good that it keeps people, including Pierce, from switching to Android. I was obviously fully aware that he paraphrased somebody else to include as evidence to support his claim. Pierce, on the other hand, was speaking only for himself.
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