Terry Godier
There is a post going around called Native Apps Should Be Avoided Whenever Possible. I first saw it through Matt Birchler’s response, Native App Propaganda is Working.
This quote got me thinking:
Most native apps collect far more data than their website equivalents ever could. They request permissions to hardware, sensors, and background processes that browsers deliberately restrict. The third-party software embedded in these apps frequently transmits your location, device identifiers, and behavioral data to third parties before you even see a consent prompt.
That’s categorically true. It is possible to do such things, and scanning the App Store around astronomy apps today, holy smokes do people do this. I downloaded the top twenty or so, and the number of permissions I was asked to grant before an app ever displayed me a starfield was incredible. Not to mention the requisite $60 a year, or somehow even worse, $10/week subscription. But I’ve written about the “free to install, but not free to use” problem before.
Today what’s on my mind is something a little different.
It occurs to me that the browser has standards and the App Store has judgment.
On the web, if I build something that works within the standards, it works. Whether people use it is up to them. On iOS, there is another question entirely: whether Apple decides it should exist.
Every platform shapes the software that’s built for it. The problem isn’t that Apple reviews apps. The problem is that when those reviews become unpredictable, developers stop taking creative risks.
In the past couple of years I’ve built three apps that were rejected from the App Store on various grounds.
The latest is one that I’ve spent ~4 months refining. It exists in a well-trodden category. There are literally hundreds of apps that do this exact same thing, sitting in the App Store today. My contribution is careful curation, world building, and innovation on the UI and UX front, as per my philosophy. Thus far, Apple has decided that my app can’t sit alongside them, even though they haven’t tested the app at all. The process is frustratingly inconsistent, when it’s coherent at all.
A while ago I tried to submit an iOS app for Dark Hours, my astronomy website for normal people. It was rejected on the grounds that it was Astrology.
It has no tarot function, no horoscopes, and nothing that I, or anyone else I’ve asked, would associate with astrology.
The App Store guidelines prohibit “fortune telling” and fart apps. Guideline 4.3(b) in full:
(b) 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. 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. Repeated submissions of this kind may lead to removal from the Apple Developer Program.
I suppose one could argue that predicting how good the sky will be tonight is a form of fortune telling. I don’t think any reasonable person would agree, but that isn’t really the point.
The point is that I can’t predict where the line actually is.
Apple says it doesn’t want spam. Fair enough.
If your plan is to build the fiftieth identical flashlight app, I understand why Apple might decide the world doesn’t need another one. But that isn’t what I see when I open the App Store.
I see countless ChatGPT wrappers with nearly identical icons and eye-watering subscriptions. I see astronomy apps requesting permissions that have nothing to do with looking at the night sky. My kids download games that interrupt play every few minutes to advertise the developer’s other subscription apps, each with their own $20–50 yearly plans.
Apparently those are acceptable. Maybe the flashlight app developers aren’t doing the right kind of spam.
Meanwhile, an app that tries to do something genuinely different inside an established category can be rejected for existing in that category at all. Some of the best apps for Apple platforms were innovations on existing categories, and I’d argue that the platform today is incredibly valuable because of it:
- Overcast
- Things
- Carrot weather
- Halide
- Fantastical
That asymmetry is what worries me and has begun to give me pause when thinking of building for Apple platforms.
If building something different means spending four or six months on an app that might ultimately be rejected for reasons you can’t predict, while building yet another subscription wrapper is comparatively low-risk, rational people start choosing the safer project.
Not because they’re less creative, but because they are incentivized to do so.
What makes it even stranger is that none of these apps were rejected in TestFlight. Even the ones that ultimately never made it onto the App Store were happily approved for external testing. If these issues are fundamental enough to block release, why aren’t developers finding out months earlier?
Reading Native Apps Should Be Avoided Whenever Possible made me realize my concern isn’t really about privacy.
It’s about governance. Apple doesn’t just decide which apps reach users. It quietly influences which ideas are worth pursuing in the first place.
