Apple’s Response to HEY Showcases What’s Most Broken About the Apple App Store

Basecamp’s new paid email service, HEY, has been making headlines recently in a very public fight with Apple over their App Store terms of service. 

Just as the service was launching, the HEY developers found the new release of the app—which included important security fixes—was held up over a purported violation of the App Store rules. Specifically, Developer Rule 3.1.1, which states that “If you want to unlock features or functionality within your app, (by way of example: subscriptions, in-game currencies, game levels, access to premium content, or unlocking a full version), you must use in-app purchase.” Apple alleged that HEY had violated this rule by pushing users to pay for its email service outside of the crystal prison of the App Store.

Basecamp’s CTO David Heinemeier Hansson tweeted: 

But many apps—like Netflix and Amazon’s Kindle —follow this same payment pathway, with users setting up accounts directly through a website and then logging into that paid account via an app in the Apple App Store. And it’s no wonder that tech companies balk at the idea of following App’s store payment pathway—as the BBC reports, Apple takes a cut of all in-app payments, often as much as 30%.

HEY announced that they had found a way forward: negative publicity and public pressure pushed Apple to keep HEY in the App Store, at least for now. Apple agreed to allow the new version of HEY with its security fixes, and HEY is seeking to release a new version of the app they hope will be more palatable to Apple long-term.

But one-off exceptions don’t address the systemic problems with the App Store, and not every app developer can launch a high-profile publicity campaign to shame Apple into doing the right thing. HEY’s fight with Apple highlights what’s most broken with the App Store: our mobile technology environment is dictated by two tech behemoths that set the rules of innovation for billions of people. And while the current system may benefit Apple, Google, and a small number of early-entrant technology companies, everyday technology users and small startups end up with the short end of the stick.

Apple’s policies are opaque, arbitrarily applied, and byzantine. The company prioritizes their own apps in search results, a Wall Street Journal analysis found, so that users searching for “music, “audiobooks,” or other categories will be shunted toward Apple products. Apple has also restricted and removed apps designed to help families limit the amount of time they spend using Apple products, according to an analysis by the New York Times and Sensor Tower. Apple also has a history of censoring apps in country-specific App Stores, including removing Chinese language podcasts from China’s App Store. More recently, two podcasting apps were removed from China's App Store. The creators of one of those apps said, “The very small amount of warning we wer