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Apple

Apple Has Removed Dash from the App Store (kapeli.com) 104

Popular API documentation browser Dash was pulled from the App Store this week after a routine migration request, its developer Bogdan Popescu wrote in a blog post. He said the migration was successful, but some features in iTunes Connect weren't available during account migration, Apple warned him. Later in the day, Apple sent another email saying the app has been pulled because of "fraudulent conduct," and did not offer any explanation. From the post: Today I called them and they confirmed my account migration went through and that everything is okay as far as they can tell. A few hours ago I received a "Notice of Termination" email, saying that my account was terminated due to fraudulent conduct. I called them again and they said they can't provide more information. Update: Apple contacted me and told me they found evidence of App Store review manipulation. This is something I've never done. Apple's decision is final and can't be appealed.Apple blogger Federico Viticci said. "This seems like a major screwup. Apple dev relationships should fix this soon." Marco Arment, the co-founder of Tumblr and founder of Instapaper, said This is a story with two major paths: Either the developer did something to deserve the rug being pulled out from under, something worthy of their developer credentials being cancelled. Or there's a colossal misunderstanding here. I suspect there's more to this than meets the eye. Either way, don't think this is the way this should have played out.
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Apple Has Removed Dash from the App Store

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  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @03:09PM (#53027415)

    I pose this as an open question as I'm really not sure. So many reviews are obviously faked now (good and bad) that you can't usually rely much on overall ratings, and have to read the real reviews... you can quickly tell which seem more real than others.

    So I wonder if apps should be pulled even if they are gaming the system...

    That said I really doubt this guy was gaming the app reviews. But it's hard to say now that we can't look at them.

    • by Calydor ( 739835 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @03:12PM (#53027433)

      Of course they matter! Now more than ever!

      Perform review manipulation on your COMPETITOR and get them removed from the marketplace!

      • It's also pretty easy to spoof addresses and identities, as least so far as list monkeys and standard management scripts will be fooled every time.
      • by SeattleLawGuy ( 4561077 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @03:21PM (#53027503)

        Of course they matter! Now more than ever!

        Perform review manipulation on your COMPETITOR and get them removed from the marketplace!

        This is a real problem, obviously, with the security-through-obscurity system that fraud detection partially relies on. If they disclose precisely why they believe there is fraud, they help fraudsters in the future--but also will catch some false positives. There is also the business case--it costs money and time to seriously investigate and review a fraud detection case, and arguably it increases legal exposure.

      • by ShaunC ( 203807 )

        So would you call that a joe job or a Steve Job?

      • by GNious ( 953874 )

        Those "gett 1000 folovers, just 5.99" services can start making a new offer to produce clearly-false reviews? :)

    • by Aaden42 ( 198257 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @03:18PM (#53027485) Homepage
      The fact that you're asking is why Apple has been taking a pretty hard line lately. Zero tolerance (cause that always works well) to try & reign in the garbage and restore some kind of faith in the review process.
      • About faith (Score:5, Insightful)

        by fyngyrz ( 762201 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @03:37PM (#53027587) Homepage Journal

        It is not reasonable to have faith in a system where public decisions are taken for secret reasons which result in well-known public disastrous outcomes.

        Other than faith that the results will be terrible.

        • Having faith that the reviews are from paying customers is a reasonable bar though.

          • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

            I can't possibly have faith in that. It's entirely too easy to throw money at someone and get them to pay a few cents each to a thousand random people to install an app and rate it. The only way to actually get high-quality reviews is to use an Amazon-like system where folks can moderate the reviews. And even that isn't perfect. It requires lots of fairly advanced machine learning to determine whether upvotes and downvotes are legitimate, because some people knee-jerk downvote negative reviews without

        • by Herve5 ( 879674 )

          Exactly.
          And the only thing surprisingly "colossal" here is the number of people still not understanding what a monopoly is. What a walled garden is. What relying on a single source is.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06, 2016 @03:21PM (#53027501)

    In an attempt to gain attack surface malware spreaders will bang pretty hard at any input they can find. Having your developer account attacked/hijacked is pretty common.

    Often this activity is mistaken for other malicious behavior and can get your account terminated.

  • by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @03:22PM (#53027507) Homepage Journal

    Has anybody tried to use Apple's new developer documentation website?

    • Every enumerated constant on a separate page
    • Breadcrumbs that don't take you back to the list of constants
    • Search that frequently takes you to those single-item pages instead of to the overarching page
    • Automatically changing back to Swift mode on every single click that causes a page change
    • No way to usefully search for keywords within an API reference unless it falls within the first paragraph of content for a given symbol (because they're spread across fifty different web pages instead of one)

    And those were just the first few P1 showstoppers that I noticed. This site should never have gone live even for WWDC, much less for non-beta content. It just isn't anywhere *near* ready.

    I'm not sure what the Dash app does or how it works, and I'm not sure if it actually improves things in those areas, but between their main developer doc site train wreck and this story, it really feels like Apple has become actively antagonistic towards developers. What the heck is going on over there in Cupertino?

    • by cdrudge ( 68377 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @04:01PM (#53027741) Homepage

      Did it make Apple's developer docs usable again?

      There used to be an app for that!

      • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        With my cynic hat on, I have the sudden urge to start a betting pool on how many months it will be before Apple releases an offline doc viewer app.

    • by TechyImmigrant ( 175943 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @04:19PM (#53027839) Homepage Journal

      >I'm not sure what the Dash app does or how it works

      It is an application that lets you easily pull in documentation for hundreds of libraries and languages for offline reading and searching.
      I find it immensely useful. I use it to keep the docs for for pretty much anything I have ever used (languages, libraries, tools). Pulling the documentation in is a case of typing in the name and clicking on the thing you want.

      I comes into its own if you travel on planes and find that an ideal time to do some uninterrupted programming.

    • it really feels like Apple has become actively antagonistic towards developers. What the heck is going on over there in Cupertino?

      Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

    • by jeremyp ( 130771 )

      I think Dash was driven by the terrible interface to the API documentation that is in Xcode. In particular, the search function sucked donkey balls.

      Dash is an app that provides a far better interface to the Apple developer documentation than Apple does. They've also expanded it so that many other documentation sets are available and you can do searches across doc sets. So, for instance, I have the Xcode, Swift and Objective-C documentation. I also have the Java 8 API, bash, vim, Python etc etc etc documenta

  • by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @03:22PM (#53027509)
    It's called "being dashed".
  • This is crazy (Score:5, Interesting)

    by radish ( 98371 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @03:35PM (#53027571) Homepage

    Dash is awesome, it doesn't need it's reviews to be padded. And the author is incredibly responsive, getting back to me on twitter questions really quickly. Sad to see what has to be a screwup by Apple cost the guy $$$.

    • Re:This is crazy (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Thursday October 06, 2016 @03:59PM (#53027727) Homepage Journal

      Sad to see what has to be a screwup by Apple cost the guy $$$.

      That's just part of the risk of being an Apple developer. If they want to do something arbitrary or capricious and destroy your entire business, there's often nothing you can do about it.

      They can even choose to compete with you and do the same thing. Call it anti-competitive or whatever, but anybody basing their business on the good will and fortunes of another business may get a temporary high but everybody knows there's going to be an end to that status at some point. Specialization / generalization is always a trade-off with risks and rewards.

      • by Lumpy ( 12016 )

        Or you could do something radical and sell your software OUTSIDE the store. It's still an option on the computer platforms.

    • Re:This is crazy (Score:4, Insightful)

      by barc0001 ( 173002 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @04:56PM (#53028071)

      Unfortunate fact of life: If your entire revenue stream is based on someone else's infrastructure (like the App Store), you are completely at another non-interested party's mercy. Same goes for all these apps and sites that repackage other content, all it takes is one change upstream and you're screwed.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Either the developer did something to deserve the rug being pulled out from under, something worthy of their developer credentials being cancelled. Or there's a colossal misunderstanding here.

    So what you're saying is that either:
    A.) Apple had a good reason to pull it.
    or
    B.) Apple didn't have a good reason to pull it.

    Astounding deduction!

    • by slew ( 2918 )

      Or...

      C.) Apple pulled it, but it wasn't at all related to if a good reason existed or not...

      Perhaps you underestimate the probability of these types of occurrences in any automated (or simply large bureaucratic) system.;^)

  • by Atrox666 ( 957601 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @03:44PM (#53027637)

    As an independent the Apple eco system is a minefield.
    You can't base a business on an environment that is so perniciously hostile.
    If they don't like what you're doing it's off with their head, if they really like what you're doing they just might steal it.
    You also get to pay through the nose for the privilege of being treated like crap.
    I knew to avoid them.

    • by meerling ( 1487879 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @03:54PM (#53027687)
      Don't forget that if you have an app, even an award winning top selling app, and suddenly apple decides to include all or even some of your apps functionality into anything apple makes, you get booted for duplication of function. So basically you're also an freebie product development and research group for apple that is liable to be terminated with prejudice at any time without warning. (Yes, it has happened multiple times.)
  • by mark-t ( 151149 ) <marktNO@SPAMnerdflat.com> on Thursday October 06, 2016 @03:49PM (#53027671) Journal
    ... then assuming they are not wrong about evidence of app store review manipulation, it must be possible for independant parties to create such an appearance, and a less than ethical person could potentially use such measures to sabotage the apps of his competitors, since Apple's decision is final, and there is no appeal process.
  • by pak9rabid ( 1011935 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @04:48PM (#53028007)
    Developing for Apple is increasingly becoming a pain in the ass. Between their draconian App Store policies and busted-ass development tools (Xcode 8 & Swift 3), I'm seriously considering moving to Android for future mobile projects...
  • by Chas ( 5144 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @05:01PM (#53028101) Homepage Journal

    This is what you get for playing in the walled garden.

    If the garden's owner decides you're done, poof, you're standing at the gate and they're telling you to fuck off and go away.

    It can be for any reason or no reason.

    Of COURSE Apple has their reasons. But do you expect them to truly be HONEST about it?
    Basically two scenarios here.

    First, Apple's decided they dislike the tech/functionality this app is using/exposing. So they're killing it with fire as an unsubtle message to other app devs to Do Not Do This.

    Second, Apple's decided they like the tech/functionality this app is using/exposing. So they're killing it with fire so that, down the road, they can create an app of their own, with similar functionality and claim to have invented it.

    Either way, Apple fuck-yous an independent developer.

    • You left out the scenario where the developer does something that's against Apple policy, and the developer should have known better. I'd suspect that's the majority of apps being pulled, along with developers not renewing their memberships.

  • Apple (Score:4, Informative)

    by ledow ( 319597 ) on Friday October 07, 2016 @02:09AM (#53029913) Homepage

    I've just spent four days on the phone with Apple.

    I work for a school.

    We have iPads. Lots of iPads.

    We were blocked by their automated system for reasons unknown, so we couldn't create iTunes accounts, given that it's a few weeks into term this is our device roll-out period.

    Four people from Apple, from four countries, and four days later, I was still no closer. I'd been told I needed to sign up for Beta/Preview services in order for it to work now, then that the school wasn't eligible for that exact service, then we were but I had to provide contacts of the IT Manager (me!). When I did, they then refused it because I hadn't included a verification contact. Did the verification contact need to be anyone higher? Oh, no, I was perfectly capable of signing the forms necessary - I just needed a random employee. So I added the cleaner. Yep, they then accepted it.

    It was then discovered that that WASN'T the problem at all. Four days of shouting, I got one guy who "would lift the restriction on our domain for 30 days". Great. What about the rest of the year? No, they can't do that at all, ever, for anyone. Agreed to at least get it working for now - more paperwork. More bullshit. To sign up student iTunes accounts into a school domain for what is quite clearly a government-authorised school in the UK.

    In the end, I'm just preparing my record of the entire farce to pass to senior management. Google have offered us an iPad buy-back scheme where they'll take in our hundreds of iPads and give us Chromebooks instead. Our Chromebook trial was a raging success after the shit that was an iPad rollout and we have nothing but trouble with Apple.

    I told the Apple guy on the phone that they don't care about education, they don't even HAVE an education line you can call in the line (he literally confessed they don't even have a number they can publish for that team), and when you call on the published numbers, it takes FOUR DAYS to get through to the guy who can actually do the bare fucking minimum of what you need to do and nothing else. He was utterly powerless and useless, there's no escalation and no customer service that I can see at all.

    I told him I needed something longer-term if I'm going to plan deployments like this. He said he wasn't able to commit to anything like that. Game over.

    I wouldn't mind but I inherited the iPad deployment and we have very expensive MDM and Mac servers and everything you need. And yet all we EVER get from them is hassle and people on support lines that know nothing and can do nothing. I would never have chosen them.

    Hell, their Apple School Manager "preview" (i.e. Beta) that they forced me onto - you can't even create users that can download a free app. You can't customise the user types. You can't even turn the users off (it takes 30 days for a user you "deactivate" using that to disappear, and in that time nobody can create another with their same email). And their "student" user cannot download apps - not even the approved MDM apps that push the paid-for apps. It basically is incompatible with any third-party MDM, so it's useless.

    Apple way or the fucking highway, and no care for anything slightly different to what they TELL you you will have.

    I've honestly had enough of them to NEVER voluntarily deal with them ever again, and I was never too pleased with them in the first place.

    • by Bad Ad ( 729117 )
      When I did my Apple certifications, I was told about this. Basically its to stop people bulk creating iTunes accounts, education are supposed to get in touch with Apple and get their IP whitelisted for 30 days when you are enrolling new students.

      The other work around was apparently to go to an Apple store, they are all whitelisted for obvious reasons.
      • by ledow ( 319597 )

        Yeah, because schools ONLY sign up students in a 30-day window during the year.

        It's shit, is what it is. And no educationally-focused company would DREAM of doing it.

        • by Bad Ad ( 729117 )
          I cant remember off the top of my head how many you are allowed to create (or if we were even told) - but theres a "so many per hour/day" rule in place. So "normal" usage should lock you out, but enrollment days etc would.

          I dont work in IT (and always hated Macs/OSX) - so dont take the fact I did the courses and got certified as anything other than I had to do it (for my previous job). But you are quite right, they dont take it seriously - we had a whole bit on how we should have an iTunes enrollment day
  • Who pays any attention to the reviews anyhow? Unless they're extremely low, I get most of my info off sites (iTunes Store OR Google Pay), then just check to see the app hasn't been absolutely panned. And I routinely hit the cancel button when bothered for a review.

    When nominally essential apps (e.g. Facebook, etc.) are hitting 3-4, but everyone has them, that should tell you something.

  • That Apple walled garden sometimes appears to be populated only with thorns and nettles, with watchful guards positioned in towers at every corner. Ugh.
  • by sjames ( 1099 )

    Kafka [wikipedia.org] covered this well.

Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (1) Gee, I wish we hadn't backed down on 'noalias'.

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