We’re on the iPhone 16 and Apple still doesn’t understand apps

It is the year of our Lord 2024. Chappell Roan is taking the world by storm, everyone is trying to make that omelette from “The Bear,” and the App Store approval process is still a Rube Goldberg machine that produces random, often craptacular results.

Halide cofounder Ben Sandofsky posted on Mastodon:

The latest Halide update was rejected because, after seven years, a random reviewer decided our permission prompt wasn’t descriptive enough.

I don’t know how to explain why a camera app needs camera permissions.

The current prompt says:

The camera will be used to take photographs

Hmm. Interesting. Interesting. Tell me more about that. What are these “photographs,” exactly? Explain it to me like I’m a 14th-century stablehand who just arrived in this century thanks to a time travel mishap involving a bog witch and then immediately got a job as an App Store reviewer. Because that’s actually what happened.

The Macalope has to agree with Sandofsky here, it seems pretty straightforward. You downloaded a camera app. It needs access to the camera. To take the photographs. Photographs are much less fun without the lenses and such. Sandofsky could, of course, add more verbiage to the prompt — “The camera will be used to take photographs for the app that you just downloaded to take photographs for. Photographs are images created and stored by interpreting light waves digitally. Also, they steal your soul. A lot of people think that’s just a superstition expressed by stereotypical backward tribal cultures in movies but, yeah, they actually steal people’s souls. Sorry you have to find out this way, in a prompt. Are you still reading this? Just tap ‘OK’ for crying out loud.” — but the Macalope’s not sure how that actually makes the prompt or the user experience any better.

The very odd thing here is that Halide was featured in Apple’s “It’s Glowtime” keynote. And is an Apple Design Award winner. And is just incredibly popular and well-known. And, finally, what are you doing, App Store review? Is this what you wanted to be when you grew up?

This is not to say that other, less well-known developers should have to wade through this fetid swamp full of bear traps. It shouldn’t happen to anyone.

Yes, this will probably get sorted out one way or another and, sure, we can just chalk it up to Halide being assigned an overly zealous reviewer who just really wanted to impress their bosses by being the most obtuse troll on the bridge over Services Revenue River, but it should not work this way. Or not not work this way, as the case may be.

Sadly, the situation is not going to change because Apple’s platform is where all the money is. This is Apple’s real monopoly, a monopoly on developers. If you’re a developer and you want to get paid for your work, you kind of have to be on iOS (sure, there are exceptions, but this is more true than not). The E.U. has made a lot of steps to address this. We can argue about whether or not they’re the best moves, but they are moves that attempt to address the actual problem. The U.S. Department of Justice suit against Apple, however, doesn’t address this problem at all.

Despite Apple’s contentions, however, making these flaws public does actually work, at least sometimes. So, there’s that. Still, if the rejections must continue until morale improves, can they at least be consistent?