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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Which is also just why… the App Store review process claiming this is a problem doesn’t seem to make any sense.

Imagine your app embeds a WebView at myapp.com/terms. It’s your Terms of Service, you show it to everyone when they sign up. Everyone clicks OK.

After it’s on the App Store, you modify your WebView to include `itms-services` for some reason. You’ve just completely bypassed App Store review and gotten that URL handler into your app. The sandbox should stop you - but clearly the review processes don’t consider this possibility and are enforcing it before you publish. Why?

My point is that the scanning for this handler, if Apple doesn’t want to allow it, seems misplaced if they wanted the ban to actually be effective.

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The review process is about Apple giving you a clear direction about what is acceptable.

There are many ways to get around their restrictions. But doing so will get you banned.

I haven't heard anything to suggest that Apple intends the review process to give clear direction.

They refused to tell him why it was rejected, hardly "clear direction"

> The app installed or launched executable code. Specifically, the app uses the itms-services URL scheme to install an app.

Seems like pretty clear direction to me:

https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/120522

The app in question doesn't actually do any such thing, though.

The wording could be better.

But it has been known for over a decade now that Apple searches binaries for strings. They've never done runtime execution checks which would pick up you actually making such an HTTP call.

My baseline would be similar to that which you get from modern compilers and automated tests. Something like:

    Lib/urllib/parse.py contains disallowed string "itms-services" at line 62 column 25
    Reason: Apps may not install or launch executable code, such as through the itms-services URI schema.

To get credit for "giving you a clear direction", I'd want them to make available and suggest a fix. In general that could be "if this is a false positive, click to request a human reviewer make an exemption" but ideally monitoring for this kind of issue in the first place (sudden increase in identical rejections) and fixing the broken check.

Instead, Apple seem to omit the information on the first line that they likely already get from their internal tool, and not only don't suggest a fix but make the proper fix so unavailable that it's easier to get the language itself changed than a check in their review framework.

> But it has been known for over a decade now that Apple searches binaries for strings. They've never done runtime execution checks which would pick up you actually making such an HTTP call.

It's true that someone with folk knowledge about the way Apple does checks, gleaned about the process by other frustrated users, could likely infer the way in which Apple's test is broken and so eventually deduce the first line from the second line. That's not Apple giving a clear direction - that's developers managing to work around an inscrutable system.

Such a check would be possible if:

1. Apple received a copy of your source code to do source analysis

2. Apple actually supported running python code as an option for writing iOS apps and wrote source code analysis tools for python for reporting compliance issues

neither of these are true.

I'm not suggesting any language-specific features like telling you which function it's in - just the filename, position, and matched string. This is information already available to Apple, and can be useful even for compiled/object code.

From the linked Github issue:

> After lots of 'we can provide you with no further information' I finally submitted an appeal for the rejection which at last resulted in Apple telling me that parse.py and its .pyc were the offending files

It does the exact opposite of clear direction. It's an arbitrary black box

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