The lesson here is that building your entire business on someone else's platform (like the IOS store) is too risky. They have full control over your business and can make one decision to ruin it in a single day.
Amazon ruined my business around 13 years ago. They kept $30K of my money for 6 months and it forced me to shut the business down. The worst part about it is that there was no real appeals process. I was redirected to either an automated response or another department that never responded to calls or emails.
Sure, you can take them to court. But this will bankrupt most people in lawyer fees.
This ended up being a good thing. This experience forced me into a new space, and I had a much more successful business for many years after.
This sort of thing is probably a lot less surprising to businesspeople than software developers. Developers may think the world works like a computer, and that business contracts and agreements are like computer code. Businesspeople know that a contract is only as good as your ability to hold the other party to its terms. There may be deviations from what was agreed to, and you might just accept it or you might try to fight it but (a) that will cost you money and (b) nobody is going to give you that money up front. And there are extra risks when one party is a lot bigger/wealthier and/or a monopoly.
In addition to this, the post is a good highlight that just because you succeed once, doesn't mean you've figured it out. Apps are an extremely hit or miss space to build businesses in, and you can have great successes followed by absolute failures and everything in between. Apps are a part of the attention economy and they live and die by the power of random happenstance on the internet.
What do you do if you build a youtube channel? Can't exactly take the algorithms with you. There are mitigating steps you can take, such as building your own mailing list, but that pale in comparison even though people probably be doing that.
The most interesting part is that apple decides to ban his account and hold his money with zero way to appeal, except to take legal action via the courts.
This is what it means to own a platform for which they have a monopoly and do not answer to anyone but themselves.
I say the initial steps for the EU to force apple to open their store to competition is sorely needed, and more needs to be done to prevent such type of abuse with zero recourse.
> This is what it means to own a platform for which they have a monopoly and do not answer to anyone but themselves.
This is true of every business. You can't set up a small shop selling fruit from your garden in your local Safeway. They own it, they decide what products are being sold from it. If there were only Safeways then maybe you can have a conversation about monopolies, but there are also Albertsons, Fred Meyers, Wincos, Publixes, etc. so you can't argue that Safeway has a monopoly. Unless you're arguing about a monopoly on Safeways, and then, well, yeah.
Apple controls their ecosystem. Google controls theirs. Amazon controls theirs. Microsoft controls theirs.
If you're an Apple employee reading this, why not create a 'Developer Advocacy' ESG that works by/with/through the community on your own, in a helpful way, to let people like this, with lengthy and earnest stories, a way to backchannel and/or bypass the bureaucracy?
It's incredible how much goodwill AAPL has been burning the past few years under Cook. The brand has been stained by repeated, user-hostile blunders, Apple's attitude towards noncompliance with democratically-established law and governments, and its protective, openly hostile attitude towards the people that make its ecosystem so great (developers, artists, etc).
Maybe it's time someone inside Apple started flying Susan Kare's jolly roger again.
This submission is probably flagged because of the awfully clickbaity title, but the link is a reasonably interesting OC reddit post about someone's experiences of ups and downs making apps.
Amazon ruined my business around 13 years ago. They kept $30K of my money for 6 months and it forced me to shut the business down. The worst part about it is that there was no real appeals process. I was redirected to either an automated response or another department that never responded to calls or emails.
Sure, you can take them to court. But this will bankrupt most people in lawyer fees.
This ended up being a good thing. This experience forced me into a new space, and I had a much more successful business for many years after.