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There are ton of apps they won't allow. Firefox and Chrome are two big ones (with their own render engines). A python interpreter. Anything with porn.

Basically, go to the Cydia store and look at any app in there. Why can't the Cydia store be allowed?

So you don’t actually have an app you want to publish?

As for the Cydia store, that allows apps to to run on jailbroken phones, I.e. with security protections removed.

It should be obvious why users want to buy a platform that is as secure as Apple can make it.

I have apps I want to publish, but why would I even begin to work on them knowing that Apple could pull the plug on me at any time?

And yes, the Cydia store is for jailbroken phones because that's the only way to load your own software onto your phone, but there are plenty of useful apps on there that aren't security issues and are only there to get around app store restrictions.

Apple doesn't have to restrict which apps I run to keep it secure. They do just fine securing MacOS, which allows one to install whatever they want.

> why would I even begin to work on them knowing that Apple could pull the plug on me at any time?

Perhaps it’s simply not true that Apple pulls the plug on apps at any time.

Billions of dollars paid to developers suggest that you are just wrong about that.

The billions of dollars paid out does not disprove that at all. There are many articles, often posted right here on HN, of apps getting pulled from the app store for random reasons. Lots of articles about apps that push an update and then get removed from the store because they found something else objectionable that was previously approved.

A few tens of articles, about things which are almost always resolved.

I personally have had updates rejected, and then simply resolved the issues and resubmitted.

It’s simply false to say that apps are just pulled at any time.

You have allowed a few voices on hacker news to give you a false impression.

benibela 1953 days ago

I made an app to show the books you have lend at a public library

And to make sure it can be used with all existing libraries web sites and all opacs, you can enter any url and an xpath expressions, and then it runs the xpath expressions each day and shows the result as list of books.

And since I wrote it 15 years ago, there were no tech libraries for headless browsers available. So I wrote half of my own browser, and an XPath interpreter. (Modern XPath is actually Turing-complete, and with the EXPath file module, it can read and write to any file)

So, if the store does not allow custom browsers or Python interpreters, those are two reasons it would not allow my app.

Nothing you have described would be disallowed.

Often the ideas about restrictions are simply false beliefs.

Of course they would be. OP said they wrote their own browser. The app store specifically disallows this. You must use the Safari render engine.

> headless browsers available. So I wrote half of my own browser

The OP said - headless browser, I.e: network and parsing the Dom, but not rendering.

Perfectly allowed. Please stop saying otherwise.

xxs 1953 days ago

Rendering engine is not the issue. It's the JIT - firefox could publish a browser, it would just need to have interpreted javascript and it'd be useless.

FlownScepter 1953 days ago

This is just wrong. Apple disallows apps that duplicate existing functionality, i.e. browsers. You can write whatever wack headless browser you want, and there are tons of frameworks for this exact purpose, too: All manner of methods to do network things without invoking Safari.

This is a jawbreaker of hyperbole around a chewy gum center of truth.