What we are talking about here is the App Store release notes, on Apple’s site and storefront. They can indeed dictate what goes there. The fact that release notes are even displayed there is because they made a facility for that.
You can publish your changelog on your own website.
One is part of the retail store experience, and the other is a kind of technical note. It depends a lot on what kind of developer you are and what kind of product you make whether these are the same.
Apple has designed an illegal system, and the DOJ is going to break them up or force them to open wide. The hoops they make people jump through are ridiculous and entirely unfair. They've made people bark like a seal for far too long.
But worth pointing out that almost all storefronts control what they allow vendors to write there.
There is nothing illegal about this, and if this is making people bark like a seal, all retailers and all app stores do it.
What do you mean? Do you think it would be fair for Apple to allow developers to serve change logs with racial slurs or political conspiracies to young users? Literal toddlers interact with the App Store on a daily basis. The release notes are not a place to spew bile, so obviously they must be moderated to some degree. We can argue over the acceptability of them trying to blame their failings onto an innocent developer (if that was actually the case), but obviously you should not be allowed to type whatever you want in a text field that gets served to their customers.
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which doesn’t exactly scream “user-relevant information” to me, but does say “this is PR”.