To request unlisted distribution for your app, send it for review as usual, then file a special form [1], and mention that in the review notes.
Source: I struggled with Guideline 4.2 when I tried to publish an app showing the bell schedule and other local information for the neighborhood school. Its audience is, indeed, not of Apple scale: the school parents living nearby. Apple refused it as 4.2 and only agreed to publish it as unlisted, which I was okay with, because sharing the link between the parents was not a big deal. Google had no problems with publishing the Android app normally though.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/support/unlisted-app-distributio...
Why would you not just make this a webpage, and then the users could add it to home page as if it were an app? no Apple review necessary then. What does it being an app give you besides bureaucratic headaches?
2. Those people and many more besides have no idea what "add it to home page" even means.
It being an app gives those people an experience that matches their normal use of technology, and I think they're probably a majority of users.
Plus, if the parent feels like making an app instead of a web page, who is Apple (or you, or I) to discourage that?
If Apple supported the beforeinstallprompt event (available in Chrome since 2015) then people would have same experience as installing app [0]. Instead, you must create a wrapper around webpage and submit thru App Store.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/befo...
There is a web version (it's Flutter so it was easy to make one), but parents use the app much more often.
Source: consulted for a company that had a PWA and paid me a lot of money to make it a native app because their users didn't know how to use the PWA.
Also, in the EU it just opens the site up in your browser, no lack of browser UI like you'd expect. Apple is wonderful.
Edit: It seems I never got the news they reversed course on that particular idea of theirs.
Your point about users not being used to this is very real. I didn’t know you could until some app author showed me.
It really is as simple as sharing a link or copy-pasting, but if you don’t know it’s a think, it disappears into obscurity in the menus.
There's still this funny business: https://developer.apple.com/support/alt-distribution-ux-in-t... & https://developer.apple.com/support/dma-and-apps-in-the-eu
Unfortunately some other features are only available to PWA do it's a tradeoff either way.
No url bar, no back/forward, no tabs, nor translation, no menu bar, no loading indicator, just… pressing down on a link shows the target url and offers open, copy link, add to reading list and share -which honestly looks like a weird oversight.
It’s not a PWA because the UX is just always inferior. Even though we’ve come really far in browser UIs, the browser is still very clunky compared to the smoothness of a native app.
And I like nice to use software.
However, I'm completely blocked by Apple app store review. There's no way an app designed for 30 people would pass.
I can't get an internal app onto people's phone. I could release it as a test app but that might get blocked at any point.
I can at least release a PWA but as I understand even that might get notifications blocked at any point, with no recourse, and of course functionality is highly limited.
So the goal here is clear: don't allow people to write small apps.
Apple can then make sure they are only allowing apps that required enough work, both initially and ongoing, that nearly everyone will feel the need to charge, or include ads, and then Apple gets a 30% cut every time.
As for why a car company's app passes, obviously they don't want anyone with enough power to challenge this in court, politically, or in the media. So those get a pass.
Don’t know how known this is. But we use it mainly for internal testing.
> The Apple Developer Enterprise Program allows large organizations to develop and deploy proprietary, internal-use apps to their employees
> Your organization must:
> Have 100 or more employees
Again, it's clear that they're providing this out so that organizations with power don't have to start a fight, while small organizations can't do anything.
Even aside from that, it's clearly going to be so much work that we wouldn't be able to do it. I'm the only developer at the company, I cannot get bogged down in Apple review processes.
I get it that people want more freedom from their iPhones but the thing about consumer devices is that they are an expression of a certain philosophy of how computers should work. Being a walled garden is one such approach. If you don’t agree with how a device operates on principle, you should not buy it—there’s Android or derivatives. You’re also likely to be a power user who’s in an incredible small minority because iPhone sales keep getting better every year and the walled garden approach has market (as in free market) validation.
Now, if your objective is to regulate monopolies, I think that the policing should happen in the supply chain and production side instead of the consumer software side. You don’t have more options than iPhone and Android because big players like Apple and Samsung have captured manufacturing facilities with long-term exclusivity contracts, making innovation in the space prohibitively expensive. But the law shouldn’t dictate what sort of computer innovators are allowed to build.
They already do, one of the reasons it's so hard to make a smartphone is all the FCC regulations on radios.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline
People are becoming more aware that they don’t want a corporation in control over this essential near ubiquitous technology.
I see no good reason to follow a “it’s a corporation they can do whatever they want” mindset
Are other competitors banned where you live?
The guiding principle should continue to be that manufacturers and retailers don't get to control the second hand market or dictate what users do with the things they purchase. Digital controls used to thwart the owner's freedom should be outlawed.
The truth is there are two reasonable platforms, as long as that is the case we should apply scrutiny.
Even more comparable is postal rules: at least here, there are very explicit rules about opening someone else's mail, or even destroying it. Even if postal/courier services are businesses, they have to operate within the boundaries a society sets up for them.
And finally, you can take it even further: some "businesses" operate on the fringes of legality and sometimes illegally too (think loan shark operations, casinos, betting markets... but also "protection services" and similar).
There are standards for interoperability and user-friendliness with all kinds of devices, and we should expect the same from modern devices.
It would have been pretty peculiar and unacceptable if your telephone in the 80s couldn't call your neighbour because the telephone company just decided to not make them interoperable, why shouldn't it be the same here?
(The only exceptions are government-granted monopolies.)
The future is one where everyone can, theoretically, install anything they want, but they get banned from everything should they actually do so. Rooted system? Attestation fails. "Oh no, looks like someone tampered with the system". Can't access your bank account. Can't communicate via WhatsApp. Can't watch something on the streaming services. Can't even play video games.
Discrimination against "untrustworthy" devices, where "untrustworthy" means not corporate owned. Leading to complete ostracization.
We just need to raise the profile of GrapheneOS and convince more banking apps to use this API, if they are already using Google's attestation API.
GrapheneOS's strategy for raising their profile and being seen as more legitimate is that they've formed a partnership with Motorola Mobility, who will be manufacturing Graphene compatible phones. <https://motorolanews.com/motorola-three-new-b2b-solutions-at...>
Corporations don't use such things for technical reasons. Their reasons are political. They want control. The "security" they talk about isn't the user's security, it's their own security from the user.
> We just need to raise the profile of GrapheneOS and convince more banking apps to use this API
And until they do, GrapheneOS is permanently at risk of being shut out of the market.
And even if they do, it just means we've become dependent on GrapheneOS. They won't trust our keys, only those of corporations. Our freedom is still compromised.
(Technically besides the point, but that is a broad statement)
I totally agree that should be swappable, but what is your point? Apple doesn't even allow installing stuff outside their store in most places, and had to be legally forced to do it in some because of how ridiculous that obviously is (thanks, EU!). And even there they still have some control with their notarization process. Android is wildly more open in major, meaningful ways, despite some failures.