mhafez17

This is exactly right. This email was never meant for public consumption, although I am glad it's out now in case it may change things for others. I do love native mobile experiences, and especially iOS. Keep in mind, Android has come a very long way to close the gap in the last 6 years. I may have dismissed other platforms too quickly, but I also believe that I would not have been able to build the products I did without this singular focus / passion. It was an iOS recommendation app, in my opinion the only way to make a great product for that is to be on the native platform.

I still use all Apple products and I am a big fan. Although their policies literally cost me millions of dollars, I am still a big Apple fan. We no longer develop for the App Store and our new company is web only.

Signed the petition! Thanks for helping make change.

As the author I was shocked to see it out there, and seeing my emotions out there like that made me feel something, I'm not sure what. But ultimately I am happy that this conversation is finally happening. I have a good feeling things are going to change for the better soon.

Pretty much. Site still up, but only one part time publisher making very little to keep it afloat. Site is now loaded with Google ads (we used to have no ads on the site). I'm kind of embarrassed to show the site in its current form. It's 99% old content, and no maintenance is several years. It was the best time of my life in its heyday.

The founders and dev team started a new company unrelated to apps. I tried my best to place our reviewers / curation team at other outlets. I had some success here, but it still pains me knowing that some of my previous team are still looking for something after all this time.

Never got a response. I am still in shock that it was actually read and even passed along. I wish things turned out differently, I at least they heard me and the got to learn the damage it did.

I guess I was groveling. This was my livelihood and I was employing 20+ people. I did not want to give up on this and have to tell the team our work and their jobs were over. I tried to be honest and explain the situation, because I believed if Tim Cook understood what happened, he would make it right.

Apple Arcade for $5 / month is a good deal. Fun games and no more money to pay ever. If you like the old Zelda games check out Oceanhorn as well.

Thank you. I would have loved to see their response. My guess it was something to the effect of it's our store, and we gave them distribution to begin with. I have seen similar comments here on HN. I honestly get that argument, but they have been rewarded very handsomely for making this platform…they are almost 2 TRILLION dollar company. At some point, the platform is bigger than you. If I was one case, okay fine, but this is happening across many product categories.

In hindsight this was obviously a mistake. We were young and genuinely loved the App Store. We bought the kool-aid (and still drinking it to be honest) that this a new better way to consume content. So we wanted to be as native as possible and take full advantage from the power of being native. We never thought Apple would someday object to us helping promote their platform.

I have no idea. I was not contacted by anyone. This email is an email Tim Cook forwarded to the executive team. So my guess is when doing discovery for this case, they got to look at Tim Cook emails regarding the App Store and this one came up. Again, this is an email that Tim Cook read and forwarded - it did not come from me providing it to anyone

Our company was AppAdvice - we did iOS app recommendation. We were most popular for our detailed curated lists, and looping gameplay videos here: https://appadvice.com/game/collections

Basically the idea was we helped you figure out which apps / games you would love and then link you directly to the official App Store to download it

No longer in the app recommendation game (too bad that was my passion. The same team who built AppAdvice has now created a B2B company helping businesses annoyomize personal documents: https://redacted.ai

Wow. I am the author of this email. I have no idea how it resurfaced after 5 years, I was only made aware of this when a friend emailed me the HN link.

The sad thing is it was not just my company which was targeted, but Apple removed this entire product category. We never knew the real reason why, or if it was bigger than just a random app reviewer trying to apply Apple policy, until May 2019.

That's when Bloomberg interviewed Phillip Shoemaker, who ran app reviews from 2009 to 2016 - regarding how Apple systemically removes whole categories of apps. I subsequently spoke to Phillip Shoemaker, who confirmed that Apple executives ordered the elimination of apps that drove downloads to the App Store. He said "Your app drove download volume. Apple doesn’t want any outside sources to drive ratings. So yeah, we got rid of all app recommendation apps." He said he thought it was unfair, but this was something Apple set out to do, and even as Senior Director of App Store (person directly in charge of App Review), he could not stop it.

The other thing that was hard to understand, is we used to have a great relationship with Apple. We were not flying under the radar. Since the App Store first launched in 2008, we used to be invited to all Apple events to see the new product launches, we met with the iTunes team to discuss upcoming initiates for the App Store, our apps were featured on the devices inside of many demo units into Apple Stores. It felt like a complete 180, and until this day I never got a formal conversation on what they actually objected to, beyond being pointed to a vague rule which was applied arbitrarily. They became a brick wall in terms of communication, and this is why I resorted to emailing Tim Cook. I assumed nothing would come of it, but it was the last thing I could think of.I never received a response, and never knew if he even got it, so I was shocked to see it again today from his inbox.