
Scrivener Temporarily Withdrawn from Sale on the Mac App Store - MaysonL
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/blog/?p=348
======
mbenjaminsmith
"2.4.1 was rejected on Monday night for a reason that didn’t make sense (the
reviewer said it wasn’t sandboxed when it was)."

I've had some incredibly fun (sarcasm) experiences with the review team for
the MAS over the last few months. Reading that sentence got a belly laugh out
of me.

The first major WTF that I had with the review team was their insistence that
an app I had submitted was calling a private method. A method with the same
name was present in an included library but rather than explain that to them I
found it quicker just to remove the library (a workaround was simple enough).
The hair pulling started when they again rejected the app for _exactly the
same reason_. As the app relied on a heavy 3rd party framework it took a lot
of investigation to understand what (wasn't) happening. Finally I took out a
$50 tech ticket and after a week the engineer explained that the review team's
tool for checking API usage was broken and it had nothing to do with my app.

The next time the review team rejected an app (seemingly within minutes of it
going into review) because it was "producing garbage output". This time I just
did a cursory review of the app before using another $50 tech support ticket.
The app was sometimes writing files with the format somefile.ext.sb-
randomstring. I suggested to the reviewer that the app was messing up an
atomic write and given the sb- part of the filename had something to do with
sandboxing. A week later the engineer explained what it was to me -- which was
exactly what I had suggested.

My advice to anyone dealing with this is to spend zero time talking to the
review team. Don't resubmit (unless it's something really obvious) and don't
try to reason with them. Filing a $50 tech support ticket will basically
guarantee that someone capable of passing the Turing test (have a conversation
via iTunes Connect and you'll understand what I mean) will look into the
problem. The tech support team will usually ask the review team to expedite
your review once the problem has been solved -- something you'll rarely get if
you ask yourself.

~~~
mratzloff
_Finally I took out a $50 tech ticket and after a week the engineer explained
that the review team's tool for checking API usage was broken and it had
nothing to do with my app._

Did Apple at least refund your $50 when they discovered it was a bug in their
own software?

~~~
mbenjaminsmith
No, neither time. You do get a certain number for free per license so neither
of those were actually out of pocket.

------
fpgeek
To me, the most interesting part of the story is the parenthetical comment at
the end:

    
    
      (Incidentally, because of some of the changes we are being
      required to make, we cannot guarantee that Scrivener on the 
      Mac App Store will have as good support for .docx, .doc and 
      .odt formats in 2.4.1 and future releases. This does not 
      affect the version on our site.)
    

I wonder what's behind this, how it actually affects Scrivener and whether it
will hit other apps in the future.

------
nickm12
This is why I'm (slowly) weaning myself off of Apple platforms after being an
Apple user and enthusiast since 1984. A computing platform where the vendor is
the ultimate arbiter of what software the user can and cannot run is
fundamentally broken.

iOS has always been this way and, though I used it for a while, eventually the
stories of apps being rejected for all sorts of reason were too significant to
ignore. When Apple tried to dictate the set of acceptable _programming
language_ for apps I gave up my iOS devices.

Though I can still run software on my macs without permission, I'm now looking
for a suitable replacement for Mac OS as well. It's difficult to imagine a day
coming where the Mac would be "app store only" like iOS, but it's not
impossible.

~~~
interpol_p
It's not quite how you make it sound.

Apple is the ultimate arbiter of software that is sold through their store.
They do not control what you build and run on your device through Xcode. You
just can't distribute the end result. It's still a computing platform, and you
can still write and run code. You can make your iOS device compute things.

There is value in being able to sell and distribute the end result — but
that's not what computing is, that's marketing.

Edit: Why not make your same complaint about Sony's PlayStation 3? Do you not
use that because it is a closed environment, one where you can not run your
own software?

~~~
mkr-hn
The PS3 isn't a general purpose computer like a Microsoft or Apple PC.

~~~
interpol_p
But an iOS phone is a general purpose computer? (The discussion was relating
to iOS devices, in addition to Macs.)

A PS3 is just another computer in your home. It just happens to be locked down
and branded.

------
wlll
I go with direct download over Mac App Store every time when it's available.
This story illustrates the reason pretty well.

~~~
incongruity
I agree fully – the danger of the walled garden platform has been illustrated
quite quickly. Though, part of me wants it to happen more, in bigger ways, so
that _everyone_ notices how bad it can be.

Relatedly, I think it's somewhat amusing – I find myself using the Mac App
Store the way I sometimes use brick and mortar stores – to look and see my
options and then I go see if I can find a "better deal" from a website – in
this case, the software publisher's site.

Similarly, the stuff I have actually bought from the App Store is either items
that are only available there or are so cheap/single use items that I don't
care about shopping around.

~~~
vor_
One person's receipt validation bug hardly means the "walled garden" (so sick
of that term) is dangerous because his update review is taking a week. He's
the one who made the mistake. Other computing platforms, such as consoles,
have had centralized approval over software titles for decades. It's only
become an issue to desktop users who are used to the Wild West and are
experiencing a transition to the software model that has existed everywhere
else for a long time.

By the way, anyone wanting automated Apple receipt validation code should look
at Receigen on the Mac App Store. It generates a validation solution with each
new version number.

~~~
incongruity
The initial mistake certainly was the software author's but that's hardly the
most important point.

There are at least three key issues brought out by the original post, IMHO:

1) By moving to the App Store distribution from a previous, independent
distribution system, publishers have clearly taken a step backwards in terms
of being able to push out bug fixes. This is a huge issue and it's
irrespective of what other platforms have to live with. It's a clear downgrade
of a valuable feature for end-users and that's a problem – particularly
because it's largely driven by policy and not technical requirements.

2A) Even worse, Apple's gatekeeping is horribly broken – approval is so opaque
as to almost seem arbitrary and therefore cannot be relied upon. This _is not_
the author's fault.

2B) The standards for gatekeeping, such as they are, are not constant. It
seems clear that features that were previously acceptable can become no longer
acceptable if Apple deems them to be competitive with Apple products. Or,
worse, if Apple alters their products in such a way as to overlap with the
_existing_ features of a product in the App Store, a program may no longer be
approved – essentially without warning and with no grandfathering due to prior
approvals.

So, yes, this story says a lot about the controlled environment of a walled
garden ecosystem.

------
rayiner
On a related note, Scrivener is the best app I've ever used on any platform.
My wife and I use it for legal writing, and I've never found anything that can
handle our workflow as well as Scrivener.

~~~
youngtaff
I really don't get on with Scrivener and I don't completely understand why.

I've gone back to Voodoo pad for writing even though it doesn't quite fit all
my needs.

------
cageface
Apple's slowly strangling the life out of their golden goose with their
capricious and heavy-handed control of their platforms. Their app stores are
full of crap already and Apple is just increasingly in the way of developers'
and users' best interests.

I really like Apple's technologies but I absolutely _despise_ their idiotic
policies.

~~~
gmac
Hmm. I find it annoying too, but I can't help feeling that for my parents (and
most other non-techie users) this level of control, with a single source of
approved apps, is just great.

~~~
cageface
A single source of vetted apps is fine but Google has already demonstrated
that allowing expert users to use alternative app sources doesn't hurt. And I
don't see how anybody can argue that required a full review cycle for every
minor bug fixes benefits users. I see more and more mobile shops iterating on
Android first because there are just fewer hassles.

Also, Apple's refusal to allow developers to do lower-level things like create
alternative keyboards means Android users get to use modern input technologies
like SwiftKey while iOS users are still pecking away at a 2007 keyboard.

~~~
gmac
_I see more and more mobile shops iterating on Android first because there are
just fewer hassles._

Hmm, more like different hassles, I'd have thought: having to support
thousands of screen size/hardware/OS combinations must be a huge pain, and
less of the UI is given to you for free. Though I speak as someone who's done
very little Android dev, and rather more iOS.

It's true that the Mac model (App Store PLUS third-party apps) is preferable
for me. But then again, I do like the idea that my parents' machines won't run
any unsigned code. I'm thinking of Windows virus support nightmares past.

~~~
cageface
I've been doing Android dev for the last six months or so after doing iOS for
about two years and actually accommodating different screen sizes really isn't
hard at all as long as you have a designer that understands it's not a fixed
layout environment like iOS. Actually the dynamic layout tools on Android make
things a lot easier in many cases, certainly far, far easier than AutoLayout
on iOS (an API I absolutely loathe).

------
interpol_p
Be _really_ careful when requesting an expedited review. We learned this the
hard way.

Your app update goes into a different review queue, and people who are not be
familiar with previous versions of your app will review it. They will pick on
things that previous reviewers had already come to terms with (either through
discussion with you, or lengthy review).

Edit: more info, this happened with our app "Codea". Because it was a coding
app for iPad, the initial review was extremely lengthy (over a month). When we
had to urgently update due to a trademark issue, our "expedited" review also
took over a month — as if it was being reviewed for the first time (despite
having past updates reviewed quickly). It didn't seem to matter that the
existing version was available all the while on the App Store, either.

Apple's review process is incredibly weird.

------
rangibaby
I nearly pulled my hair out when a sandboxing bug in 10.7.5 broke one of
Apple's own apps.

<http://imgur.com/F5roY1h>

<https://support.apple.com/kb/dl1599>

------
jrochkind1
So, for iOS, the app store and apple's possibly arbitrary gatekeeping is the
only way to get an app to your users.

For OSX desktop... what are the benefits software publishers get, just
marketting/visibility, basically?

~~~
limmeau
Not having to run a shop.

------
gfosco
How many users are still using 10.6? Couldn't the description be updated with
a note specifying the temporary issue with 10.6? Seems like that would be a
lot simpler than taking it down...

~~~
bigiain
Anybody with a single core intel machine (there's two of them in my house
right now, an old Mac mini, and an old PowerBook that still works fine)

~~~
Samuel_Michon
The Mac mini 1.5Ghz, a 7 year old model, is the only modern Mac with a single
core Intel CPU. The PowerBook line had PowerPC microprocessors, and the
MacBook Pro series never had single core CPUs. Apple did however release
MacBook Pros with Core Duo CPUs -- OS X 10.7 requires at least Core 2 Duo. by
2007, all models had Core 2 Duo CPUs.

------
caycep
reading through this, it all sounds familiar. then it hits me. this is like
trying to get a grant reviewed by the NIH!

------
plg
How's that freedom working out for ya?

~~~
vor_
What does this even mean?

~~~
plg
apparently it means downvote me

