Apple Begins Rejecting Apps With 'Hot Code Push' Feature (apple.com)

Apple has long permitted "hot code push", a feature that allows developers to continuously deploy changes to their mobile apps and have those changes reflect in their apps instantly. This allowed developers to make quick changes to their apps without having to resubmit the new iteration and get approval from the Apple Store review team. But that's changing now. In response to a developer's query, Apple confirmed that it no longer permits "hot code push." The company told the developer: Your app, extension, and/or linked framework appears to contain code designed explicitly with the capability to change your app's behavior or functionality after App Review approval, which is not in compliance with section 3.3.2 of the Apple Developer Program License Agreement and App Store Review Guideline 2.5.2. This code, combined with a remote resource, can facilitate significant changes to your app's behavior compared to when it was initially reviewed for the App Store. While you may not be using this functionality currently, it has the potential to load private frameworks, private methods, and enable future feature changes.

Comments

Pray I don't change it again

[H3lldr0p]

Seriously, unless you're part of a big corp with big corp lawyers and money behind you why develop for Apple? You have to buy your way into their walled garden, give up a significant portion of sales to them, and be put through an obscured process to get approval to be published in a store. Which, if you're lucky enough to hit on something that's both novel and popular, is going to fill up with a bunch of clones within days of the first hint of success.

If you're not doing it for the fun of being repeatedly punched in the face, what are you doing it for?

Re:Pray I don't change it again

[rworne]

Let's see:

I'm a one man shop that does App development as a hobby while simultaneously maintaining a full time job. Having someone handle 24/7 hosting and billing and a sort of rudimentary QA on the final product (so the users will trust it better) is something of value. In many cases, costs and time would be prohibitive for a new, small shop to do all these things itself. So they do something for that 30% other than rubber stamp it.

Also, $99 is a pittance - how much do dev kits from Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft cost?

Now another poster pointing out that the rules are different for larger companies that develop on Apple's platform - yes they are. I see competing apps that violate the backgrounding policies (for good reasons) that I could never get away with if I tried.

One example is playing silent audio while streaming via DLNA from the iOS device to prevent the OS from putting the app to sleep after 10 minutes or so. A big company just does it and has done it for years without consequence. Another small developer in my niche needed to do this as well, but was forced by Apple to remove it unless there was a specific function for it. So the developer instead added a useless "visualizer" that made graphic effects to music picked up by the microphone which is then put in the background and hidden - just to get around the rules. I have not added DLNA streaming yet because of these headaches.

Re:Pray I don't change it again

[Orphis]

How much is an Apple computer? You can't compare the cost of the license without taking into account the hardware required.

Surprised

[tonyyeb]

Surprised they ever allowed developers to do this? Surely in defiance of the objective of it being checked in the first place if you can just change it once approved.

They are worried about the CIA

[jafiwam]

Seems like the timing of this might be related to the information released by WikiLeaks about what the CIA has been doing. Being able to get into just about any mobile or IoT device for example.