Apparently this isn’t the first time Apple and I have needed relationship counselling.
I went looking through my own archive this week and found a fairly long paper trail documenting what can only be described as an on-again, off-again relationship with Cupertino. Not hatred. Not blind loyalty either. More the sort of relationship where you occasionally storm out, declare it finished, then come back a month later because you miss the coffee machine.
And somehow, here we are again.
2012: my first proper App Store lesson
November 2009. I’d just bought an iMac and decided it was time to write an iPhone utility. Samantha and I were both doing Weight Watchers at the time, and before eating anything the ritual was to work out how many “Points” it was worth using a $50 calculator bought at a meeting. Enter the energy and saturated fat from the nutritional panel, receive the damage.
So I spent a weekend building one for the iPhone. It was my first experience of submitting to the App Store, and I learned very quickly that writing the app is the easy part.
It was rejected for possibly breaching Weight Watchers patents or trademarks. So I did the research, contacted Weight Watchers Australia, established there was nothing on the Australian App Store doing what iPoints did, and after some correspondence with a legal representative in Cupertino, iPoints was allowed on the Australian store. Four weeks, start to finish.
December: 90 sales. January: 380. February: 401.
No one was getting rich, but knowing nearly 900 people were walking around Australia with my weekend project was genuinely cool.
Then came a letter from Apple. Weight Watchers International had issued a takedown order, blah, legal threats, blah. I tried contacting Weight Watchers both internationally and locally. Stonewalled at every turn. They had nothing on the App Store themselves, and I offered to develop it further and share the profits, minimal risk to them. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Not even an acknowledgement of my emails.
When I phoned Weight Watchers Australia and introduced myself, I was told:
“Oh, we are well aware of who you are Mr Usher.”
Which is the sort of thing that sounds flattering for about half a second.
The app had earned around $700. Legal advice would have eaten that before anyone got as far as an opinion, so I pulled iPoints from the store in February 2010 and it stayed a sore point for years.
Then, one Friday evening in March 2012, I was digging through my code archive and found the iPoints folder. You know what, I thought. Let’s redevelop it.
That evening and into Saturday I rebuilt the UI, added a custom keyboard, changed the measuring units and added Retina support. Done. Submit.
Seven days later I woke up to Ready for Sale, this time on the international store.
The lesson stuck: the answer isn’t always no. Sometimes it’s just no for now.
Read: iPoints available for sale
2014: Dear Apple, it’s over
Two years later I was considerably less charitable.
By December 2014 I’d had enough of the reboots, the lacklustre battery, the fights with Xcode, the mediocre updates and what felt like a general lack of care for developers. The wearable had been teased and looked like more of the same.
So I wrote Apple a breakup letter. Literally.
I told Apple the passion had waned, confessed that the skinny white Samsung that had been hanging around my desk had become serious, mentioned the LG watch, pointed out that I could now use tools like DevExtreme and target more than Apple offered, and signed off with:
“So this is it, this is goodbye.”
Very dramatic.
Also, as jmbucknall pointed out in the comments within a couple of hours:
“Except for your MacBook Pro with the retina screen?”
Reader, I had not left Apple. I had left the phone.
I still had the iPad. I still had the MBP.
It was less a breakup and more a trial separation where I kept the house.
2015: I came crawling back
I lasted a month.
Android had looked exciting from across the room, and for a few weeks it was nice parading about with wrist notifications and changeable watch faces. But that turned out to be the whole pitch, a facade. Too many variables, too many inconsistencies.
So in January 2015 I published the inevitable sequel, Oh Apple, I’m such a fool…, in which I admitted I was missing the consistency, missing the ecosystem, and missing even the problems: the fights, the Siri-irritation moments.
I promised to wait patiently for the watch and to stop complaining about beta quality.
I signed it “Paul x”.
Subtlety has never really been my strongest blogging characteristic.
Read: Oh Apple, I’m such a fool
2016: Bad Apple
And then Apple reminded me why we’d broken up in the first place.
Back in 2013 I’d lost access to an Apple account after losing my only trusted device and never writing down the recovery key. That one was entirely my own stupidity and I accepted it, along with the hundreds of dollars of software, music and movies that went with it.
New account. Two-factor enabled again. Recovery key recorded properly this time, not handwritten, not typed out, an actual capture of the Apple screen saved to Evernote, timestamped within a minute of Apple’s confirmation email.
Two and a half years and thousands of dollars later, Final Cut Pro alone was $500, I entered that recovery key.
Your recovery key is not valid.
One hour and ten minutes on the phone, several escalations, technicians walking me through the same steps to reach the same result, and nothing.
This was during all the noise about Apple and the FBI, which made it feel especially pointed: Apple could hold firm against a federal agency but couldn’t get me back into my own iTunes purchases.
The question I asked then is the one I’d still ask now:
Should it really be this difficult to get access to things you’ve paid for?
Read: Bad Apple! The real cost of two factor auth
Fast forward ten years
This time I haven’t lost an account, haven’t switched platforms, and haven’t bought a Samsung in protest. If anything I’ve gone the other way entirely.
I built Who’s Flag Is It Anyway? as a genuinely Apple-native app. Swift, SwiftUI, StoreKit, AVFoundation. iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. No cross-platform framework, no third-party SDKs, no shared template, no Android build waiting in the wings.
Given my history, that’s practically a commitment ceremony.
Apple rejected it under Guideline 4.3(a), saying it shares a similar “binary, metadata, and/or concept” with apps submitted by other developers.
So I appealed.
I documented the app, documented the architecture, explained the code was original, listed the twelve game modes, and offered a technical walkthrough of the source.
And I asked one specific question:
Which app do you believe mine duplicates?
The App Review Board upheld the rejection.
They did not answer the question.
Which is why I recently wrote:
Apple Says My App Is a Copy. They Won’t Tell Me What I Copied.
The pattern
Fourteen years of writing about Apple and I’m remarkably consistent.
Not in my opinions, those swing wildly, sometimes within the same month, but in the reason I keep writing about Apple at all.
I care.
If I didn’t like the products I wouldn’t still be using them. If I didn’t like the platform I wouldn’t still be building on it. If I thought the ecosystem had nothing to offer I wouldn’t have spent this much time, money and effort living inside it.
The frustration exists precisely because Apple is usually very good at the things that make me keep coming back.
When something that good drops an opaque process between a developer and their customers, it stands out.
The theme has never really been “Apple is terrible”.
It’s been:
Apple, you can do better than this.
Apparently the feeling is mutual
The genuinely funny part of this latest chapter is that the LinkedIn post about the rejection has travelled well outside my usual network.
A lot of developers, a lot of senior people, and according to LinkedIn’s demographics, some of them work at Apple.
So there’s every chance that somewhere inside Apple, someone has now read an article about how Apple won’t tell me what Apple thinks I copied.
There’s something beautifully circular about that.
So, Apple…
We’ve been at this a while.
I wrote my first iPhone app in 2009. I’ve praised you, criticised you, threatened to leave, actually left, come back within a month, and spent years building for your platforms.
I’m currently running bleeding-edge Apple developer tooling, which suggests I’ve learned nothing at all.
And after all that, I don’t want special treatment, an automatic approval, or for App Review to simply take my word for it.
I want something much more boring than that.
Actionable information.
If the app is too similar to another app, tell me which one.
If it’s the metadata, tell me which field.
If it’s the binary or the concept, say so.
Give me something I can investigate.
Developers are remarkably good at fixing things once we know what the thing is.
Fourteen years on from my first App Store adventure, that’s still the part of the relationship I don’t understand.
So no, Apple. It’s not over.
Apparently it never is.
But we really do need to talk again.