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  • Hacker News
  • 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.
    by arjie
  • 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.

    by ceejayoz
  • 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.

    by lapcat
  • 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.

    by Grombobulous
  • 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.

    by ceejayoz
  • 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...

    by guessbest
  • Huh. Do they share review staff with Apple Pay certification? We've been waiting for 6 weeks, with complete silence from Apple.
    by KingMob
  • 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.
    by moonlighter
  • 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.

    by sandoze
  • 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.

    by john_strinlai
  • 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.

    by quentindanjou
  • Wow, that is beautiful.
    by ilikeitdark13
  • 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

    by darkhours
  • 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.
    by HeavenFox
  • 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.
    by rpdillon
  • 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.)
    by iamnothere
  • 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 :)
    by nullishdomain
  • 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.

    by duxup
  • 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."

    by MerrimanInd
  • 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.

    by dd8601fn
  • 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.
    by szidev
  • 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.
    by Jonovono
  • 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.
    by aliasxneo
  • 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.
    by wookmaster
  • 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.
    by port11
  • This article is retracted.

    Read https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_reje...

    by edwinjm
  • > 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”.

    by DrJokepu
  • 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.
    by midtake
  • Ah yes, the Herobrine gambit
    by rkunde
  • 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.

    by echelon