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Comment by ben1040 | Hacker News Reader

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines

4.10:

You may not monetize built-in capabilities provided by the hardware or operating system, such as Push Notifications, the camera, or the gyroscope; or Apple services and technologies, such as Apple Music access, iCloud storage, or Screen Time APIs.

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This only applies if the sole reason of the purchase is to gate an apple capability. If the purchase does more than that, literally anything, you can gate all the apple parts on an iPhone.

Where does it say that in the guidelines?

They don't restrict the App on the Phone to access Apple Health, just the synch between their Cloud and Apple.

Developers can only write data into Apple Health from the local phone SDK.

Cloud import is only supported from health providers and laboratories.

Nordictrack does this with iFit as well. Can’t sync to Apple Health without a paid account. Syncing is somewhat janky too.

I've always felt that YouTube is also breaking this rule by making background playback a Premium feature.

Know why you've always felt that way?

Because YouTube is breaking that rule by monetizing background operation.

I'm not seeing how that would be a violation. Youtube has never been a "download files to my device" service. It has always been a "stream video from our servers" service. I don't see how the fact that they added the ability to save a file and gated it by a subscription would be a violation.

Can you explain how you see it as one?

This isn’t about downloading videos for offline use but about background playback.

YouTube recently blocked the ability to play a video in the background (or with the screen turned off) unless you pay for premium. It just turns off the video if you leave the app, unlike other media on my iPhone.

AFAIK you can open the video in Firefox, which allows you to stream in the background. of course not that seamless, but at least there's still a work-around.

Orion browser on iOS supports this very seamlessly, both pip and background.

I haven’t been able to do background play in YouTube without Premium for at least 4 years. I also recall finding Reddit threads of people having the same issue.

So… not exactly new for iPhone users.

Just because someone broke the rule in the past, persisted in breaking the rule and is still breaking the rule today doesn't mean they get a free pass to break the rule.

Yep, and I'm saying that those four years ago (or whatever time it was) I was convinced that it is against this specific App Store guideline, but alas Apple has approved it.

> "download files to my device"

> they added the ability to save a file

Since when?

Oh, you mean pre-caching it and allowing the cache to play off-line?

It is not "downloading" or "saving" a file if I don't get an actual file on my file system I can use. I hate the abuse of this term.

Did you know that it's technically against the Apple TOS to use push notifications for advertising without allowing end users to opt out of the advertising part without removing functionality, even though it's never enforced and massive companies do it all the time?

Even Apple themselves do it, I see apple send me push notifications that are ads for Apple Arcade all the time.

The fee is to unlock something on their own back end, triggered by using a non Apple device. So Apple’s license probably doesn’t apply (the corner case that could cause it to apply is the app generating a key and sending it to the Withings infrastructure, I suppose).

But they are monetizing the export button you press before the api call is made.

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