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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 guest it wasn't "in the cards" for me

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...)