[kire456]

The OS vendor could "destroy" you by making changes to the OS that affect your app, right? The Old New Thing[0] is full of stories of apps that exploited undocumented implementation details of the OS, and were surprised that those aspects were in fact changed in a later OS version.

To its credit (though not everyone agrees), MS has spent a lot of effort making compatibility shims, basically doing other people's work for them, but they have no such obligation.

0. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

[bmj]

This strikes me as a different class of problem. Of course software developers are at the mercy of other software and hardware, and have been since the days of yore. And even in that case, you could still potentially debug the issue.

This is a different class of problem. In this case, a gatekeeper is asking you to use their service to distribute software through their channel, and that channel is governed by vague rules that may, in fact, be enforced on a whim. Further, the gatekeeper isn't being clear with the rules, and why you may have run afoul of them.

[john-radio]

> The OS vendor could "destroy" you by making changes to the OS that affect your app, right?

You sound like someone who's made the mistake of supporting Apple

[asdff]

That's a software problem for any language. Will the authors break compatibility? They sure can and do all the time. You are always at someone else's mercy in computer science.