It's worse than that - sometimes "trashing them" (i.e., writing a dryly-worded blog post simply stating events that transpired with no hint of anger) is the only thing that helps.
I did have success once with sending an e-mail to tcook@apple.com. I have read that like Steve, he does read many of those external e-mails.
This was when the App Store review times had climbed to 28+ days. I never did get a response, but shortly thereafter they started going down, and within a few weeks were down to the 3-7 day range. I don't think they've gone significantly over 7 days since.
It was that mentality that, finally, made me buy a little piece of land in cyberspace (others may call it a domain name) - yeah you can get your blog hosted a million places for free, but by owning your own you can move to a new host.
Actually, you don't own that domain, only rent/lease it. And you don't own the servers neocities uses to host websites either, and they can "terminate the agreement at any time for any reason for no reason.".
There's a lot of confusion surrounding what defines ownership in the information age. For example, IP addresses are held like real property despite just being numbers in a database. However, a physical device isn't owned by the user if the carrier can restrict what can be done with it and/or modified/disabled it at any time for any reason without explanation. It also varies by culture too, with most 'Eastern' countries treating virtual goods like real property, and most 'Western' ones treating them as non-transferable services which can be cancelled.
Mind, that post you link to has the right idea, just that the only way to achieve what it recommends is to buy a server and IP address, and lease a T1 line or the like.
Thanks for the link! Great advice for everyone building on corporate owned platforms today. Yes, sometimes it is the right way for your business to start or grow, but make that choice consciously, not in ignorance.
"Our stuff [his company put a CMS in the browser] didn’t do all that much more, but given a choice between client and browser, the people wanted the browser."
And now, you can make the case that given the choice between a mobile web browser and a mobile app, people have chosen the app.
Running to the press works great, /if and only if/, you have enough of a following or already have that groundswell of popular opinion behind you.
If not, be prepared to be either ignored, 'shut down', or get the immediate reprieve you were seeking, and then after the media has died down, run into a brick wall.
I don't know about that. Seems to me that the one major requirement is that you need to actually be in the right, and Apple needs to be in the wrong. If you run to the press for some perceived slight that nobody else cares about, you'll get roasted no matter how popular you are. If you got legitimately screwed by Apple, you'll generally get results even if nobody knew about you before. (Everybody loves an underdog story, after all.) I'm sure these factors can swing it for marginal cases, but, well, don't do it for marginal cases.
"If your App is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to. If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps."
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
When this company controls your livelihood, you are wise to take a very broad view of what "trash us" means.