So WWDC wrapped up last week and yeah, Apple Silicon is the headline everyone's chewing on, the whole "we're ditching Intel" thing. I'm not going to add another take to that pile, there are already about four hundred posts this month doing the "what does this mean for the Mac" thing and honestly I don't have anything new to say until I've actually held one of these chips in my hands.
What I keep thinking about instead is the Hey thing. You remember Hey, the new email app from the Basecamp guys (well, from 37signals, whatever they're calling themselves this week)? Jason Fried and DHH spent something like two years building this thing, launched it a couple weeks back at $99 a year, and then Apple rejected their app update and basically threatened to pull it from the App Store entirely unless they added an in-app purchase option so Apple could take its usual 30% cut.
DHH did what DHH does, which is tweet about it nonstop and very loudly, and for a few days there it felt like half of tech Twitter was picking a side. Is Hey a "reader" app like Netflix or Spotify (which don't have to offer IAP because they're just showing you content you already paid for elsewhere)? Or is it a regular app that has to play by App Store purchase rules like everyone else? Apple said no dice at first. Then, right around the same week as the WWDC keynote, they quietly backed off and let the update through, and a few days after that they said they'd clarify the reader app rules going forward and build some kind of appeal process for developers.
Here's my actual opinion on this, and I know it's not a popular one among some of the people I follow: I don't think Apple is wrong that its rules apply evenly, but I do think it's completely absurd that this required a founder with 180,000 Twitter followers screaming about it for four days to get a fair hearing. If you're a two-person indie shop who gets the same rejection email, you don't get Phil Schiller's team quietly fixing things for you by the weekend. You get told to comply or get delisted, full stop. That's the actual story here, not whether Hey specifically deserved an exception.
I've been building little side projects and toy apps for going on nine years on this blog at this point, going back to some genuinely embarrassing Objective-C stuff I posted about in like 2012, and I've never shipped anything to the App Store because I always got spooked by exactly this kind of thing. Not the 30% cut itself, I get that hosting a store and running review infrastructure costs money. It's the opacity. You never really know which rule you're going to get hit with until you've already sunk the time in.
Anyway. A couple smaller things from the same stretch of days that are worth a mention and then I'll leave it there. Reddit's had another round of subreddit bans working through the pipeline this week, mods getting notices about content policy stuff, though I haven't seen the full list yet so I'm not going to speculate on who's on it. And Zoom, which has basically become a household verb this year the way "google" did fifteen years ago, said they're rolling end-to-end encryption out to free accounts too after getting hammered for restricting it to paid users only. Good. That was a dumb hill to die on in the first place, restricting real security to people who pay you money is exactly the kind of thing that makes people distrust a company more, not less.
I don't have a tidy way to wrap this up. I've got a coffee going cold next to me and a stack of RSS items still unread from the last three days because apparently I can't keep up with tech news and also have a day job. Go read the actual Hey saga thread on DHH's Twitter if you want the blow by blow, it's a genuinely wild few days of a founder going to war with the biggest company on earth and, weirdly, sort of winning.