Here the section of the Apple Dev Agreement if anyone is interested:

4. Confidentiality. Except as otherwise set forth herein, you agree that any Apple prerelease software, services, and/or hardware (including related documentation and materials) provided to you as an Apple Developer (“Pre-Release Materials”) and any information disclosed by Apple to you in connection with Apple Events will be considered and referred to as “Apple Confidential Information”.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, Apple Confidential Information will not include: (a) information that is generally and legitimately available to the public through no fault or breach of yours; (b) information that is generally made available to the public by Apple; (c) information that is independently developed by you without the use of any Apple Confidential Information; (d) information that was rightfully obtained from a third party who had the right to transfer or disclose it to you without limitation; or (e) any third party software and/or documentation provided to you by Apple and accompanied by licensing terms that do not impose confidentiality obligations on the use or disclosure of such software and/or documentation. Further, Apple agrees that you will not be bound by the foregoing confidentiality terms with regard to technical information about Apple prerelease software, services and/or hardware disclosed by Apple at WWDC (Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference), except that you may not post screen shots of, write public reviews of, or redistribute any such materials.

https://developer.apple.com/terms/apple-developer-agreement/...

Then why not just say so in all his support calls? "You've violated the NDA, so we've disabled your account permanently." Now you have a clear reason and a clear violation. Apple gate keepers get to show their insane dominance over all parts computing on their hardware.

Personally I hate this new move towards Apple/Microsoft/Google being gatekeepers for everything that can run on a machine. It's fucking bullshit.

Because lawyers. Apple currently is under no obligation to release the rational for their decision. If they publicly tell him why, he can challenge it much more effectively. The apple NDA is possibly too broad to be enforceable and given that ALL of their competitors are allowed access to the developer system, gives them no traditional protection of trade secrets. Id est, It gives them an unintended benefit of controlling the public story (and thus some degree of market forces) about their products, but does not keep their market competition from peaking inside. If they divulge the rationale, and he challenges it in court it would upend their (and lots of other) developer programs, or at the very least cost them lots of time, attention and goodwill fighting to preserve it.

In order to challenge the decision to revoke his developer account in court, he would have to show that Apple has a legal obligation to provide and maintain such accounts. I suspect that Apple has no such obligation, and therefore a fear of lawsuits would not be a reason for them to conceal the reason for his account revocation.

The distinction between hardware and software is blurring. Software-defined-X is becoming a thing.

Apple/Google/Microsoft thinking is easier to understand if the black slab in your hand is considered one thing, not two things. If it is not a general purpose personal computing device (PC), but a branded PDA that makes calls.

For most consumers, that’s right, and for them, the strategy is right. Make the PDA experience seamless and safe.

>Personally I hate this new move towards Apple/Microsoft/Google being gatekeepers for everything that can run on a machine. It's fucking bullshit.

It's what people want. The population is happily giving these companies all this power, and refuses to abandon them or pressure them in any way when they do this stuff.

And to be fair, I don't see Google acting nearly this badly. If anything, they're the opposite: they don't exercise enough control over their app store, so it has a lot of spyware and malware. As for MS, they seem to be incompetent and powerless: they tried to make an app store for Windows 10 and that was a big flop, and of course they tried to ape Apple/Google with Windows Phone, and that was a big flop too.

> Presumably in violation of the developer program's NDA.

Even if that seems likely doing all that without a "real" full locking of the account and an email seems kind of odd.

Shadowbanning is an effective technique, so it can be intentional.

IMO shadowbanning is a highly unethical practice, especially but not exclusively for the fact that there will be false positives.

There will always be false positives because even if reviewed or decided by group or committee, human judgement is always flawed and none of us really know if a ban is appropriate or justified. (And even if it is, there is always a concept of remorse or forgiveness that should be a thing too.)

Just think of your own personal experience. How many times have you been wrong when being judgemental about other people? How many times have they been wrong about you? Most of the time that's just a mild social thing and it has no consequence, but practices like shadow banning make it consequential.

Shadowbanning people who have a wide reach on other platforms doesn’t usually work all that well, as this instance shows.

> he leaked marketing images for Apple Watch Series 4

I don’t think this specific one has anything to do with the NDA.

I don't think that really changes anything.

That article clearly indicates he sourced some information from the developer program betas, which would be a violation of the NDA when publicized.

Then Apple can respond in an above-board way to such a violation. If the want to conduct their response through secret channels, in a harassing way, they shouldn't look to the courts to support their NDA rights on this.

The same way that you can't stop paying rent to your landlord because he hasn't fixed your sink, Apple can't harass someone because they believe he is in violation of a contract.

Revoking access isn't a secret channel nor harassment.

> Your rights under this license to use and access the Content will terminate automatically without notice from Apple if you fail to comply with any of these provisions.

And cutting off access is quite possibly reasonable. But they've gone quite a bit farther than "no notice" in refusing to answer any questions after the fact (or even point to the contract and any provisions they may think he is in violation of, if this is not just wild speculation) when approached by him. It makes their position that this is some sort of contract dispute far weaker. I assume there is an arbitrage clause in the contract? Has Apple contacted that party yet?

If he has a case, then he can invoke the arbitrage clause.

Given that there is clear public evidence that he is misrepresenting what happened and that he has profited from breaking the NDA, why is any of this work that Apple should do?

If that's the reason shouldn't Apple have warned/informed him by now?

The Apple Developer Agreement states:

> Your rights under this license to use and access the Content will terminate automatically without notice from Apple if you fail to comply with any of these provisions.

> More recently, I tried calling again and got to talk with a supervisor, who said I would be getting an e-mail with instructions to get my access restored.

A supervisor shouldn't/wouldn't string him along in this situation

I have had many customer service supervisors give incorrect information. They've generally only got what they see in the CRM/ticketing system to go on; it's entirely possible that they may not be privy to, say, a note from the legal department.

Oh, he totally has. But that doesn’t mean Apple shouldn’t tell him why they locked him out.

Surely he knows?

Why they locked him out? It doesn't look like it.

The rest of us seem to know.

Do you think he doesn’t know that 9to5mac published the information he provided to them?

I don't see anyone here that really knows anything about the situation. Just because a hundred people have speculations here doesn't make it fact; it's completely possible that he just failed to sign a Brazilian legal form or something.

Not really. We actually do know quite a lot about the situation.

We can see he has very likely violated the NDA.

By not mentioning this, and presenting himself as just another developer trying to make nice apps, we can see that he clearly has the capacity to be disingenuous. Most developers don’t reverse engineer Apple software and supply the results for publication.

We also know that if Apple froze people’s accounts for failing to sign a Brazilian legal form (or similar), it would affect a lot of people and we’d know it was a real possibility. But they don’t.

We don’t know anything with 100% certainty, but we easily have enough certainty to make it obvious that failing to mention his reverse engineering practice is a major red flag for his credibility.

I am "just another developer" who has probably violated the NDA as well. Reverse engineering beta OSes and distributing information about it totally OK, the problem is when you take screenshots.

Have you published information about undisclosed features in the press?

Why is distributing information covered by the NDA ok, but screenshots not?

> Have you published information about undisclosed features in the press?

Define "press".

> Why is distributing information covered by the NDA ok, but screenshots not?

Because that's what the license agreement says. Information about prerelease software is OK to discuss, sharing screenshots is not.

Ok - so it seems like you are confirming that we do know what he has done that breaks the NDA.

Yes. It's just that we don't know if that's why Apple has locked him out of his account.

Not for certain, but we do know that it is a strong possibility which he disingenuously leaves out of his account.

Sourcing information is specially allowed by the develop agreement. It's screenshots that aren't.