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DrJokepu 22 minutes ago [-]
> 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”.
midtake 1 minutes ago [-]
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.
aliasxneo 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
szidev 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Jonovono 41 minutes ago [-]
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.
You can still always get around them (at least my experience), but it just takes a lot of time
swe_dima 29 minutes ago [-]
It's why I love React Native and over the air updates. So I don't have to deal with this roulette.
rpdillon 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
iamnothere 30 minutes ago [-]
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.)
ceejayoz 18 minutes ago [-]
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.
Exactly, computers should only be allowed to do what expert gatekeepers deem safe. There is no possible way to allow competent users to bypass this. Even if they had to go submit a blood sample and sign a document in front of a judge, grandma would just do it anyway! Lock it all down and make sure that compilers require a government license.
john_strinlai 1 hours ago [-]
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.
postalcoder 53 minutes ago [-]
There is no live tarot feature. Thats the point.
settsu 11 minutes ago [-]
Sounds like you'd make a fantastic iOS App Store submission reviewer!
Jtarii 14 minutes ago [-]
It is impressive that you seemingly read the article and still don't know what it was about.
john_strinlai 52 minutes ago [-]
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.
rcstank 47 minutes ago [-]
You missed the fact that the article also explained there is no feature like that in the app.
robertjpayne 54 minutes ago [-]
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
par 12 minutes ago [-]
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?
tantalor 1 hours ago [-]
Is astrology not allowed in app store? That's kind of a weird thing to ban.
gcampos 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Rohansi 6 minutes ago [-]
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
SXX 4 minutes ago [-]
This doesnt affect casino app spam whatsoever.
arjie 59 minutes ago [-]
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.
ceejayoz 10 minutes ago [-]
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.
Kim_Bruning 27 minutes ago [-]
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?
edwinjm 1 hours ago [-]
I am quite an Apple fan, but this dampens my enthusiasm considerably.
How many great apps are rejected, but build by people without reach?
rpdillon 19 minutes ago [-]
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.
30 minutes ago [-]
TooSmugToFail 33 minutes ago [-]
Damn. What a shocking level of incompetence.
Has Apple really sunk that low?
drcongo 56 minutes ago [-]
Reject this, but allow a billion spammy gambling scam apps pride of place in App Store searches. Gross.
AlexandrB 1 hours ago [-]
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.
> 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.
ceejayoz 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
> 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”.
You can still always get around them (at least my experience), but it just takes a lot of time
> 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...)
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.
> 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.
dark hours doesnt have live tarot reading.
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.
How many great apps are rejected, but build by people without reach?
I'm a fan of letting users add repos from vendors they trust, so there isn't one centralized gatekeeper.
Has Apple really sunk that low?
> 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.
Nothing about level one app review should need coding skills. Appeals, maybe, but even there, it's almost never about the code.