Two years have passed unnoticed since the events that made me write the article "Complaints at Apple" - about the chaos in the industry that creates cool programs and interesting gadgets for everyday life.
Briefly about the previous article, it described a routine case of deprivation of a developer license from a software developer working on the iOS mobile platform Vadim Bashurov, a member of the DO-RA project team. Along the way, about the revocation of the license with the blocking of the Apple working account of the head and investor of the DO-RA project, followed by a miraculous restoration of rights from Apple.
A year has passed since the restoration of the development license of the DO-RA project manager. However, when updating our custom software - DORA.Pro in the App Store in April 2020, an unexpected event occurred - a warning from Apple that they say I am engaged in illegal activities, fraud and plagiarism, and that my license, like Apple's account, may be blocked in soon, if I do not file an appeal within 14 days to Apple, counting from the time of this message.
The accusations against me were standard, without unnecessary fantasies, because the artificial intelligence of Apple has long been responsible for this, and not living people. I quote the text sent to me completely without exceptions, since it is not secret and the logic of the article will be clearer:
Other — Other
Hello, Upon further review of the activity associated with your Apple Developer Program membership, we have determined that your membership, or a membership associated with your account, has been used for dishonest or fraudulent activity. Therefore, your Apple Developer Program account has been flagged for removal.
We found that your app is in direct violation of the Apple Developer Program License Agreement, which states:
«You will not, directly or indirectly, commit any act intended to interfere with the Apple Software or Services, the intent of this Agreement, or Apple’s business practices including, but not limited to, taking actions that may hinder the performance or intended use of the App Store, Custom App Distribution, or the Program (e.g., submitting fraudulent reviews of Your own Application or any third party application, choosing a name for Your Application that is substantially similar to the name of a third party application in order to create consumer confusion, or squatting on application names to prevent legitimate third party use).”
During our review, we found a pattern of manipulative or misleading behavior that violates the Apple Developer Program License Agreement. These behaviors can include, but are not limited to, inaccurate metadata describing your app or service, misleading app content, engaging in inauthentic ratings and reviews manipulation, providing misleading customer support responses, providing misleading responses in Resolution Center, engaging in misleading purchasing or bait-and-switch schemes, and other dishonest or fraudulent activity within or outside of the app.
If you would like to appeal this termination to the App Review Board, you must do so within 14 calendar days. When submitting your appeal, be sure to select „I would like to appeal an app rejection or app removal“ from the drop-down menu on the Contact the App Review Team page. Otherwise, your Apple Developer Program membership will be terminated and all apps associated with your account will be removed from the App Store.
Best regards,
App Store Review
Based on the above, a formidable warning, I promptly wrote an appeal to Apple with a capacity of 4000 characters in decent English, the form where I tried to clarify with Apple exactly what my fault was, did not allow more ?! I really wanted to know: facts, actions, events that led to such a deplorable result ?! At the same time, I consulted with my American colleagues, what is the threat of such accusation of “fraud” under American law? Their answer did not inspire me, because in the USA you can easily sit down for a fraud for several years, improving your skills not in the field of programming and circuitry, but at best in table tennis and checkers. Chess is not a game for American prisons, although the movie "The Shawshenko Redemption" is a clear exception.
Exactly 14 days later, a negative response to my appeal was sent to my e-mail, the essence of which is a preventive ban for 1 year without the right to re-appeal (as in the USSR - without the right to correspond;). There were no answers in the letter - what were the reasons for such a ban for such a long period. And nevertheless, my team and I still tried to "information attack" various Apple services in order to enable ourselves to objectively understand the violations that we certainly did not commit.
Due to the refusal to place our custom applications in the App Store, we had to wrap up our export operations for the supply of DO-RA.Q devices to Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, as well as other online stores abroad. The fact is that our products stated in the instructions and on the boxes: the cross-platform device works, in particular, on mobile platforms: iOS and Android. By the way, before these events, our gadgets were already sold in more than 20 Russian online stores and supermarkets from OZON to Auchan. But in Russia it is easier to replace information that misleads the buyer. Over the hill, this is a whole gimmick associated with cost risks, claims and fines.
However, after writing the 5th or 10th letter, in the end, Apple services let us in, as they say, in a circle, assigning long numbers to our requests and not responding after one or two weeks, even when we tried to clarify everything on everything request status. In such "sincere dialogues" 3-4 months flew by, then we tried to call Apple support, but the result was the same - first good-natured support, then a pause and a cold instruction - wait for an answer by mail.
We tried to issue a corporate license for a software developer from Apple to our own company, JSC Intersoft Eurasia, which during the period of US sanctions was also not an easy task. I even had to call the US special department to assign our company a special identification code in the States, otherwise there was no way. It's good that we found this identification code, which was blessing assigned back in the era when Intersoft Eurasia worked with Apple in the framework of the MFi program (2012-2015). Then our team had “unrealizable” hopes that the DO-RA.micro chip would be integrated into smartphones and tablets, if not Apple, then within the framework of a similar project ARA Project / Google.
Having paid our $ 99 starting in September 2020, we quickly received a corporate license, under which a certain number of programmers of our team could work and the right to upload our own software developments in the App Store and TestFlight. At the same time, we again ran into small, but surmountable difficulties. I had to rename the custom application DORA.Pro to DORA.Plus, since according to Apple regulations, the same names are not allowed for different developers, and the prefixes in this case are still working.
After removing the latest bugs from our programs: DORA.Plus, DORA.Light, we began to look forward to passing the verification stages in the App Store. At first everything went smoothly, for each instance for 1 day. Previously, our DO-RA applications passed the entire review within 24-48 hours.
And suddenly a thunder struck out of the blue ... As part of the corporate license of Intersoft Eurasia, the service of the American company Apple reported the same thing as written in English at the beginning of the article: Other - Other ... Hello, Upon further review of the activity associated with your Apple Developer Program membership , we have determined that your membership, or a membership associated with your account, has been used for dishonest or fraudulent activity. Therefore, your Apple Developer Program account has been flagged for removal.
An attempt to appeal to Apple on such charges again failed. To be honest, we somehow became sad from the despair of our situation. After all, a part of the gadget market, and not the least profitable one, was lost with the deprivation of developer rights on the iOS platform. But we decided not to give up anyway ...
To be continued.
04/17/2021