Apple's App Review Board Rejects a Legitimate Astronomy App as 'Astrology'
App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours
Developer Terry Godier's iOS app for his astronomy website Dark Hours was rejected by Apple's App Review Board on the grounds that it was astrology. Despite Godier's appeals and the app's obvious scientific nature, the board upheld the rejection, claiming the app includes a live tarot reading feature. The app, praised for its design and usefulness, remains unavailable on the App Store, highlighting the arbitrary and unaccountable nature of Apple's review process.
It’s straight out of Kafka.
- DrJokepu
> But that’s not what happened at all. Godier proceeded through a series of escalations up to the App Review Board and the Review Board responded that they determined the original rejection was valid because, I shit you not, “We understand that the app includes a live tarot reading feature.”
> It has no tarot function, no horoscopes, and nothing that I, or anyone else I’ve asked, would associate with astrology.
I have dealt with the Byzantine App Store bureaucracy before. What you do here, is you submit a new version, pretty much identical to the previous one, with the comment “tarot function removed”.
- aliasxneo
In my last SRE role I was the unfortunate victim of having to maintain a mobile app submitted to both the Android and iOS app stores. I would never wish it on my worst enemy. It was the one thing that I could absolutely _not_ guarantee any sort of reliability with. It was all up to the random person who happened to review the current release and the release process could be as quick as a day in the best circumstances or up to two weeks if we got a particularly difficult reviewer. They seem to have absolutely no context sharing between reviews.
- duxup
I’ve developed iOS and Android apps, store approvals are always a crap shoot, and it’s not just approvals, it’s paperwork… sudden rejections over something that was fine months earlier and getting pointed to a document that could mean ANYTHING.
I got rejected with a screenshot from an app that doesn’t have anything like the screenshot, it took me several rejections to realize someone reviewer watched some old YouTube video I submitted ages ago and didn’t like something that was fine before…. They have a login where they can see the first page , I gave it to them , but they chose to reject because of an old video.
I recently signed up for a personal dev account for the play store and I have to get 12 friends with android devices to “test” it before they’ll consider my app at all…
That is to say I have to go online and horse trade with 12 people (hell if I know who these people are or what their unapproved apps do…) and get them to test mine if I test theirs. That alone is suspicious kinda behavior but google all but requires it now.
Meanwhile on my work account I’m publishing just fine.
- szidev
What an insane ruling considering Co-Star is entirely an astrology app and was picked as an app store "Editor's Choice" at some point.
- MerrimanInd
It's a massive problem that mobile apps are most users favorite way to consume programs yet are one of the few forms of distribution being gatekept by two massive and opinionated companies. It feels like the slow creeping rot at the foundation of the premise (and promise) of technology and the internet.
Which makes this a good time to remind everyone about the Keep Android Open movement:
> "Starting in 2027*, a silent update, nonconsensually pushed by Google, will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed over government ID."
- guessbest
This is funny because they aren't approving anything right now
Developers are wondering if they are the only ones on their forums:
https://developer.apple.com/forums/topics/app-store-distribu...
- rpdillon
This kind of thing reminds me of why I've always felt there shouldn't be a gatekeeper. Add your repos, install your apps. Folks should be allowed to have more than one repo to install apps from.
- nullishdomain
I've published both iOS and visionOS apps, and my favorite rejection came from visionOS. When you click a link to open it in Safari, the system uses an existing Safari window if available. The app was rejected because the link didn’t work... the reviewer had Safari open somewhere outside their field of view. Approved on appeal :)