The New York Times has written a great dive into mobile apps that harvest data off your device, such as location data. Many of these companies feel entitled to harvest and store your data for things like location when you give consent for location access, and are in the business of selling that data to advertisers.

The book ‘1984,’ we’re kind of living it in a lot of ways.

Bill Kakis, a managing partner at Tell All

I’ve been removing a lot of the native apps I’ve relied on recently in favor of mobile web apps. I won’t let Facebook run code natively on any device I own, precisely because I know they go out of their way to capture every scrap of data they can. Running Instagram in a mobile web browser provides a much stronger sandbox, limiting the amount of data they can steal dramatically.

Apple and Google have largely destroyed any real marketplace for paid apps that don’t need to rely on selling data, and app review mechanisms have been unwilling or unable to protect customers from it. They deserve a huge share of blame for the status quo being what it is.

Apple’s App Review has made another sweeping change that is disrupting the lives of developers yesterday, kicking out a bunch of apps without warning that are for gambling. Many of the apps involved have either nothing resembling gambling mechanics in them. And many of these are from small developers who effectively have no recourse.

It appears that this was a massive overreach that is actively getting walked back by Apple, but it still highlights the fact that Apple can and will terminate your business on a whim, without warning, based on whatever reason they like. And since you can’t bypass the App Store like you can on Android, if your business depends on this, you’re toast. Decisions like this are why I don’t make my own iOS apps anymore.

Apple’s official line:

In order to reduce fraudulent activity on the App Store and comply with government requests to address illegal online gambling activity, we are no longer allowing gambling apps submitted by individual developers. This includes both real money gambling apps as well as apps that simulate a gambling experience.

As a result, this app has been removed from the App Store. While you can no longer distribute gambling apps from this account, you may continue to submit and distribute other types of apps to the App Store.

They’ve pulled magazine app (since restored), a GIF search app (since restored), a YouTube search app (since restored), a YouTube player, a photography app, a Reddit client (since restored), and many others. It’s unclear if these were all automated, though in at least one case it appeared to involve a call to Apple developer support. There’s also an 11 year old blackjack game and a poker chips calculator app, which possibly could fall under some definition of “simulated gambling”, which is now apparently against the rules for some reason.

Since there is no oversight of App Review or the rulings it makes, there is no way to know the full extent of the bans, how many apps were affected, or what percentage of them are being reinstated. Still, it sounds like this was an error at least some of the apps are returning. I’m sure the developers could’ve done without the panic attack from an email suddenly stating that their apps were kicked off, though.

Meanwhile, Apple continues to allow and profit heavily from apps with actual gambling mechanics like loot boxes and gacha games that encourage people, including minors, to gamble.