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Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

As a user and developer, it’s a little frustrating to see Apple try so hard to ban an app that (like it or not) has real value to millions of people, while in the meantime allowing so much trash to exist in their stores.

Sneaking code into Fortnite? Really? I could probably pull up 10 examples of sketchy apps in no time that clearly are doing things they shouldn’t (and that’s just the “weather”).

Harm to Apple? I would argue that trash apps harm Apple considerably. For instance, I have effectively stopped even looking for software on the Mac App Store, and the difficulty of searching/filtering has curtailed much of my activity on the iOS App Store too. I know for certain that if the average quality was higher and the search was way better, I would be buying more. Shouldn’t Apple care about things like that too?

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Agree. Right now they are aggressively enforcing rules, but the rules are not producing a high quality bar.

Apple needs to decide if they want the App Store to be carefully curated like an Apple retail store, or broad like Amazon.com. Today they're squeezing the quality while ignoring the shit; it's so backwards.

It really feels like there's two teams with different priorities.

It makes perfect sense depending on how you look at it. If you look at it as a question of quality, and Apple wanting to keep a high bar for quality, it looks scatterbrained and ineffective. If you look at it as Apple trying to wring all the money they can out of the market, then it only makes sense for them to focus all their attention on the apps that are good enough to actually make money.

If Apple truly cared about keeping the quality high in their walled garden, and it wasn't just about extracting all the money they could, wouldn't they do both?

The "wring all the money out of the market" theory explains Hey and Fortnite, but not the many, many apps that receive arbitrary rejections, like this recent HN browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24410652

This arbitrary friction of "what if the user searches for covid" is applied to useful software, but not Candy Crush clones. So naturally the store fills with shit. Even in the free app tier!

In some weird way, this shows it's not all about the money, since they're fighting to keep out the quality free stuff too.

Well, who wants to pay for something when a good free alternative exists? And if people aren't paying, how is Apple going to get their 30%?

Free apps are only in Apple's interest as much as they think it makes people like their platform more. I think they care less about that then they used to, since there's so many different things pulling and pushing people to use iOS already.

I agree that Apple lets too much crap into the App Store. But to be clear, that’s not an argument in defense of Epic. On the contrary, I think Apple should be much much more restrictive in what third-party apps they allow on iPhones.

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