The App Store rules and Apple’s selective interpretation cause a pre-WWDC dustup.
In the wee hours before Monday’s WWDC keynote, Apple managed to smooth things over with Basecamp, the two having fallen into a very public disagreement over the rejection of an app update to Basecamp’s cross-platform email service, Hey.
That’s the name of it. It’s called “Hey.” That’s not just how the kids talk now, putting “Hey” at the end of sentences. It might be, The Macalope doesn’t really know. It’s not how he was using it in that sentence, hey.
He was using it that way in that sentence.
The 1.0 release of Hey had been approved by Apple but the 1.0.1 update was rejected under the argument that it should never have been approved in the first place because it didn’t implement Apple’s purchasing mechanism so the app didn’t work immediately. This rightly incensed Basecamp’s management which shot back on Twitter and the company’s website, saying Apple was acting like “gangsters.”
Microsoft, which has never done anything wrong itself and was just trying to be helpful, chimed in to say that it is very concerned about app store pricing. Microsoft takes just 5 percent of revenue from apps sold on the Windows Store. Of course, it has to because the Windows Store is a ghost town that the ghosts have also have decided to leave and have gone so far as to take their favorite tumbleweeds with them.
“I’m taking Mr. Brambles and Spikey.”
And it gets worse when you actually do get into the details.
