Good morning, friend. How are you this fine Tuesday? I hope things are all right. I hope that thing you were worrying about works out okay. For hate is never conquered by hate. Hate is conquered by love. Stop searching forever. Happiness is just next to you. Don't worry about things in the past, there is nothing you can do about them now. Don't worry about things that are happening now, make the best of a bad situation. Don't worry about things in the future, they may never happen. Etc. Etc. Consider making this fortune cookie site your home page.
Before I get into todays (unfortunately) single-topic issue, please consider heading over to Postable via this link to update your address for our holiday cards, or enter it for the first time.
So Elon has finally realized Apple is going to be a problem in his life. Do I want to talk about this? No, not really. I want to tell you all about my amazing toilet seat lift pedal and my extensive planning to improve upon the foot pedal by making an expanded pedal of cork lined with rubber or leather and how I'm going to have to use a router on the edge of the pedal to give it a curve, because when you first step on it, it's at an angle, but as it goes down, it is flat, and your foot needs to be comfortable at both angles. But no. I have to talk about Elon instead.
Is Elon dumb? Like he is intentionally acting like he just found out about Apple and their incredible hold they have over his company. This would be impressive since, you know, it was a major news story over the last two years and many people, who are not even in "the business" have been subjected to articles about it, at least if they, you know, read the business press or, you know, hang out on Twitter. I have to assume he's just playing dumb, which really is a pretty odd move. Like he's got a checklist of things he needs to rouse his rabble of mindless orcs about, and he got to the “get the choads pissed off about Apple” item on his to-do list, and said “guys, guess what I just learned. You're never going to believe this.” That is literally his primary motivation in writing these Tweets. Choad motivating.
But, you know, as someone who has been responsible for the content of a giant platform when Apple came along and said “hey fix this or we're going to pull your app” and as someone who spends a lot of his time working with the monetization of mobile apps, and as someone who right now still routinely deals with Apple's app approval process, this topic is somewhat up my alley.
Anyway, there are two big issues here, as anyone who's built an app knows: the app store approval process and Apple's usurious 30% cut of your app's revenue. They are related, in the sense that they both spring from Apple's paternalistic smothering, but they are distinct. Elon has chosen to go over both of them at the same time, which I'm sure is just a coincidence. I'm sure than him informing us that Apple is threatening to pull Twitter from the app store while also suddenly getting all upset about the 30% fee is just a coincidence.
Let's break it down. First, the fee.
Apple charges a 30% fee for every app and subscription you obtain in their app. Thanks to North Carolina's favored son Tim Sweeney and his Epic Games, there are now a few little loopholes here. First, the fee is lower for the first million or so, and hey, for Elon that might be all he ever makes off of Twitter Blue if present trends continue lol lol. The second loophole would actually work just great for Elon, if he weren't an idiot. Apple has exceptions for memberships that work on many platforms — if you buy that membership outside of the App Store ecosystem, you don't have to give Apple a cut. This is how Netflix works, for example: you gotta go sign up somewhere else. If you sign up somewhere else, no cut for Apple.
In theory this would be perfect for Elon. Apple's logic here is that if you do it in the App store, they helped, with marketing and whatnot. But Elon has no problem generating awareness on his own, he could totally do this without Apple’s help. He could have launched Twitter Blue everywhere at once, and, being the owner of a giant communications platform, gotten the word out that you had to sign up for it at Twitter.com/blue or something. But he didn't. He launched the thing only on iOS, only in the App Store. Because he thinks “going fast” means “smart” and told everyone it would be easy to make Twitter Blue and they should be able to make it in a week. Because he is dumb. And he was wrong. There's really no other explanation for this. He was just flat-out stupid about it. And he fucked himself.
He could still fix it, though. Twitter would be severely constrained about the marketing messages inside the iOS app, but he's got a voice, he could work around this. He's complaining about it now because a) that'll make his life a little bit harder waaah waaaah waaaaah I thought you were hardcore dude, and b) it is a convenient obfuscation about what's really going on: Apple is going to pull Twitter for content and moderation reasons.
(aside 1: It remains an open question whether Apple would view Elon's actual Tweets, visible within the iOS app, as marketing messages directing users to alternate payment methods, which would be a violation. And if they viewed them as acceptable, would they still view them as acceptable if, you know, you just happened to see them all the time, like ads?)
(aside 2: Apple lost the Epic Games v Apple case a bit more thoroughly than is currently “the rules” within the app store ecosystem, because the case is still under appeal, and they were not forced to comply with everything prior to the outcome of the appeal, and maybe things will get a bit better for Elon and the rest of us in a year or two but unlike the rest of us, Twitter doesn't have a year or two, at this rate it'll be out of business before the appeals finish.)
tldr Elon's 30% gripes are mainly self-inflicted and a smoke screen for the real problem, which is that Apple's going to pull his app from the app store.
(Oh aside 3: Elon's also butthurt that Apple has stopped spending a ton of money on Twitter ads. Apparently Apple is a fairly large advertiser on Twitter, to the tune of 9 figures a year. They pulled that spend because Elon sucks and now he is accusing them of hating free speech which is the classic right wing canard: those who exercise their free speech in a way the right doesn’t like hate free speech. In mentioning this, Elon was doing nothing more than a hail-mary rabble-rouse of his mob in a hope that Apple will be upset about it. That was literally the strategy: scare Apple's execs with death threats. Classy.)
So, turning to the main issue: Apple's app stores approval process. I am more sympathetic to Elon here, though in the end he is going to lose. But if he dents Apple on the way down, all the better.
What we know is that “Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why,” according to Elon. I have gotten these messages. They are frustrating. But they do sort of tell you why, in that they might say you're violating App Store policy #12 or whatever. You wish they'd be more explicit, but you can figure it out. But it takes trial and error. And guessing. Apple seems loathe to just tell you the name of the movie you have selected, because, you know, they don't want to tell you how to run your business while they are telling you how to run your business. It's a pointless song and dance, directed by a remote and uncaring power, but you can get through it almost every time with patience and impulse control, not his strong suits unfortch.
It's also super frustrating because most of Apple's app store approval process is, to put it simply, kabuki theater, lies, hypocrisy and inconsistency. You might submit an app ten times, get approval for it ten times straight, in less than a day each time, and then on the eleventh time, they will reject the app and claim that something's wrong with it and point you to something that has not changed in the last ten updates, but did change twelve updates ago. So you're sitting here saying “but nothing's changed,” and they will not admit they didn't look at that part of the app the last ten times, and eventually the only way to fix this miserable situation is to realize that some minor change you made ten versions back is the problem even though Apple is insisting they check that part of the code every time. It's a total Catch-22, the purest form of Kafkaesque bureaucracy and it is maddening for normies, let alone the most powerful manbaby in the world to whom no one ever says no.
So all of this is now Elon's lived experience and it is the lived experience of every app developer and we are sympathetic but also: hey dude. When people say “this stuff is hard” and you say “nonsense, coding is easy.” This is what we mean by it being hard. Mobile app development isn't hard because actual coding, like the syntax and shit, got harder since your Paypal days in the 90's, it's harder because coding for the real world is harder, because of shit like this. This was all known and predictable and real super geniuses would have seen it coming.
The most interesting part to me, though, is the unique dichotomy between Apple and Twitter, and boy oh boy, am I loving this part, because the chickens are coming home to roost, indeed, and I am 90% sure that under the surface of all of this, Apple is sort-of freaking out and boy do they deserve it. That's because, contrary to Elon's whining, Apple has been favoring Twitter with a giant double-standard for years.
For years, things that would get Tumblr kicked out of the app store were going on unchecked on Twitter. Matt Mullenweg, the current owner of Tumblr, is still (rightfully) complaining about this. When I worked there, the things that they threatened to shut us down over were 100% exactly things that happened on Twitter every day, that were perfectly fine on Twitter. And I do not mean more esoteric things like “level of content moderation” or “rapidity of DMCA takedown requests.” I mean very binary things like “you should not be able to see sexual acts.” This is still the case! Tumblr has removed all sexual acts from the entire platform, logged in or no, on iOS or no, because of Apple. And yet right now it takes a couple seconds to find expliicit sexual acts on logged-out Twitter, and are rampant, if you look for them, on logged-in Twitter. I just double-checked this and it took about 10 seconds on logged-out Twitter. Yikes.
This has always been the case. Apple has always treated Twitter deferentially. It is 100% quantifiable, even now, and 100% bullshit.
So, now that suddenly Twitter is in new hands, this is a giant problem.
Because I guarantee you Apple had zero plan for "hostile takeover of a previously favored iOS app."
And the very nature of Apple's app store approval process is heavy on the act of app submission. They only ostensibly check your app when you submit one.
We know this is not actually true, because Apple has routinely contacted apps and said “hey your app is in violation we might pull you” — as they did to Tumblr, as they did to Parler, as they have apparently just done to Elon — and those messages don't necessarily coincide with the app store submission timeline. They seem mostly driven by news events but Apple would never admit that.
And unlike Facebook, Apple’s approval process is entirely inbound. That is, the whole thing ostensibly hinges upon you sending them your app, and them checking it out. There is no audit process beyond this. They don't ask you questions (aside from the consumer-facing privacy label but really so long as you're truthful on those questions, within reason, that's fine. The purpose of those is for consumer information, not Apple enforcement). With Facebook, these days at least, you know have a bunch of invasive questions, and they ask for supporting documentation, as part of the standard process. Apple doesn't do this. This is no SOC audit. It's just them looking at your code.
So, now, they're reading the papers like everyone else, seeing Elon bork Twitter, gut the moderation teams and safety teams and security teams, and these are all things that Apple very much cares about, but... what can they do? It's not like you self-certify that you have X number of moderators employed as part of the App Store submission process. Until something newly uniquely bad happens, Apple has no real leg to stand on, aside from their historical habit of chasing PR stories.
But in this case, prudence has said that maybe they need some backup. Maybe they need some backup because Elon has hoards of admiring fans that might get pissed, not that Apple cares about that especially.
Or maybe they feel like they need some backup because they have always been completely hypocritical when it came to Twitter, Twitter has been routinely in violation of App Store guidelines for literal decades, except now, suddenly, Apple cares and they need to have some real good new reasons, documented. Except they can't look too new. Or unfair.
So the fact that Twitter is now filled with jizz and Nazis isn't going to be enough because Twitter has always been filled with jizz and Nazis and Apple was just fine with it.
So they gotta sit around until Twitter makes a new, bigger misstep.
And it has to be clearcut, and definitive.
Which means in the meantime Twitter keeps getting a little bit worse, with more jizz and more Nazis, but until, like, a state-sponsored actor gets away with a hack that they wouldn't have before, or something of that level, well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm sure all of this has been apparent to Apple since the day of the first round of layoffs. It's hopefully caused some soul-searching over there. I'm hoping they've been scrambling trying to figure out what to do about this, a problem as much of their own making as of Elon's.
But I'd be shocked if Apple is gonna let it lie, and we are seeing evidence of this now.
Hopefully they sort their hypocritical shit out and act swiftly now.
So we can get to the real shitshow, the battle of the titans.
Oh god this took all issue, I am sorry I am sorry. I have so many other fun things I want to talk about. Like the fact that the command-K key command to insert a link is broken on Substack in Safari right now and it is killing me. Or Helena Bonham Carter's bullshit. Or Ride and the Charlatans egregiously overlooking North Carolina on their upcoming tour. But tomorrow, tomorrow.
Shoegaze mix for you today, I think I am nearing the end of the Shoegaze k hole that is Spotify’s recommendations, I’m getting a lot of repeats now and random single-EP bands from 2015 or so. Still a lot of great stuff, though, and learning. All of the stuff on this is “new to me” except Lycia, whom I’d forgotten about and my friend John reminded me about them a couple weeks ago.
And my own band, Rockets Burst from the Streetlamps, as the closing song, because that song fucking rules and it’s one of the things I’m more proud of in my life and I never listen to it.
As someone very familiar with the app store process, this edition today was a hoot to read. (Also btw re: your possible trip to NYC, my band I Get Wild will be playing Talking Heads covers at Littlefield on 12/9 if you're around/free/interested. Hopefully no Wallbreakers in attendance.)
Despite it being completely out of my wheelhouse, I found this single-issue issue utterly fascinating—it's like a friggin soap opera! (And, like almost everyone else, I'm desperate for Elon to get his comeuppance.)