Apple Starts to Woo Its App Developers
I used to work at a company whose flagship product is an iOS app. I have typically worked on web things and was working on the API used by the product. But it always struck me as strange how different of perceptions iOS devs had from most developers I&#x27;ve met about what constituted &quot;reasonable requirements&quot; from platform providers.<p>I get that you play ball with these things and pay what you owe to get access to the market of Apple customers. I do get that. But I also think that relationship is mutualistic, and that app developers bring a tremendous amount of value to the platform that causes people to buy Apple products in the first place. And I would argue that their value has not been assessed fairly by Apple given the amount of cut they require and the amount of stipulations they create about permissible ideas. Yes, a certain amount of these rules do make sense, but some are unbelievably arcane and arbitrary. For instance:<p>&quot;Apps that unlock or enable additional features or functionality with mechanisms other than the App Store will be rejected&quot;<p>It&#x27;s absurd that something like this would be in your platform&#x27;s rules. That eliminates a huge number of possibilities in app development that would have absolutely no negative impact on Apple&#x27;s reputation or the safety of the App Store.<p>And it would be another thing if these rules weren&#x27;t given much credence, but from what I&#x27;ve seen, developers are generally worried about being caught for these kinds of things during app review, and they take the policies very seriously.<p>I don&#x27;t know if the iOS developers I&#x27;ve known are representative or not, but in any case I&#x27;m happy that some of them are starting to push back.