2:00

rule on the fly that they didn't even

2:02

bother to document that is the

2:04

app needs to do something when you download it.

2:07

That is, you can't just have an app

2:09

that has a login screen when you download

2:11

it. And that was

2:13

basically sort of their way out of the embarrassment,

2:15

I suppose. And we said, like, okay, fine. We're

2:18

not going to arm wrestle Apple

2:20

to the ground. On all the points, here's

2:23

an opening where we can get our Hey Email

2:25

app into the store without paying the 30%. So

2:28

we took it. And then after

2:30

that, Apple amended the App Store guidelines in

2:32

all sorts of ways. Most

2:34

specifically, they carved out these

2:36

free companion apps from having

2:38

to use in-app payment. This

2:40

was essentially sort of the

2:42

victory we got out of round one. There's

2:45

a whole slew of exceptions in the App

2:48

Store guidelines as who has to use the

2:50

in-app payment system, who can get around it.

2:53

This is why you see applications like

2:55

Netflix, for example, you download Netflix, you

2:57

can't do anything. You have

2:59

to have a Netflix account that you

3:01

bought on netflix.com or on another device

3:03

or service that doesn't have these restrictions.

3:05

And then you can log in. It's

3:08

also how stuff like Salesforce work. There's

3:11

a million of these kinds of apps that require

3:13

you to have a pre-existing account and then log

3:16

in. And that's

3:18

what that carve out, the free

3:20

companion app carve out was supposed

3:22

to give us. It was supposed

3:24

to give us security in knowing

3:26

if you have a service that

3:28

isn't app first, that exists outside

3:30

of the universe that Apple has

3:32

created, and you manage to

3:34

sign up customers on your own outside of

3:36

the App Store, you can put your free

3:38

apps in the App Store and people can

3:40

use those to access your service. It's

3:44

called the 313F rule

3:47

and it's about free companion apps. And

3:49

it lives there, Apple has this other

3:51

exemption for what they call reader apps.

3:53

This is what Netflix and these other

3:56

streaming apps fall under. Reader

3:58

apps will extend certain types of interest.

4:00

enterprise apps are exempt certain

4:02

type of multi-platform apps.

4:05

It's very complicated. And

4:07

this is the weirdness of this setup.

4:10

Apple went through the trouble of specifying, I

4:12

think, like 12 amendments

4:15

or something to who has to pay for the in-app

4:17

service. There are all these exemptions like, this app doesn't

4:19

have to pay, they do this thing and they stand

4:21

on top of their head and they stick out their

4:23

tongue, then they get in. You

4:27

then think that those guidelines would actually govern

4:29

Apple's behavior when it comes to these apps.

4:31

They would actually follow the guidelines and if

4:33

you clearly fall into one of these categories,

4:35

if you are streaming app like Netflix, they're

4:37

not going to shake you down if

4:40

you live up to that. That's what we

4:42

saw. When we submitted the Hey Calendar app,

4:44

we did a thorough review of the App Store

4:47

guidelines. We went through every point, let's make sure

4:49

we're not in violation here, let's make sure we're

4:51

not in violation there, let's make sure we follow

4:53

this letter of the law. Exactly

4:55

because we just went through this like three

4:57

years ago and we're like, do you know

4:59

what? No, don't want to do that again.

5:03

Which is funny as an aside, there's some

5:05

people who are like, oh, you planned all

5:07

this, you set Apple up and then you

5:09

made this amazing marketing campaign by goading Apple

5:12

into rejecting you like, what? What? First

5:15

of all, what 4D chess

5:17

strategic vision do you think we have

5:20

here that we can just like maneuver

5:22

the largest most valuable company in the

5:24

world to just play our little tune?

5:26

I mean, that would be amazing. If

5:29

we had like little puppeteers springs here and

5:31

we could just like fill Schiller reject the

5:33

app once but not twice, only for two

5:36

days, it doesn't hurt us too much like,

5:39

what? What are you? What

5:41

do you want about? That's just not how this works. We

5:43

absolutely read those guidelines to

5:45

make sure that we were not going

5:47

to run the risk again of angering

5:50

Apple as it is because listen, 85% of

5:53

the people who use our hay bad

8:00

news, says that they don't have to

8:02

put anything in writing preferably, says that

8:04

they're not accumulating evidence to the inevitable

8:06

lawsuits that will follow from this. But

8:08

anyway, Bill calls us and says, like,

8:10

you know what, it took

8:14

three weeks, more or less, for us

8:16

to review all this stuff because it

8:18

actually went all the way up to

8:20

the app review board, which is this

8:22

mysterious Illuminati board that no one knows

8:24

who's exactly on, but apparently has final

8:26

authority to control who gets to be

8:28

in the app store and who doesn't.

8:31

This was not a low-level mistake. Apple

8:33

took their sweet time, they took weeks of

8:35

deliberation to arrive at the verdict that you

8:37

can't be in the app unless you, as

8:39

he said, he gave us two options here.

8:42

Either you just pay us, just

8:46

give us the money, just give us the 30% if you

8:48

start doing in-app payments, we'll let you in.

8:52

What? We'll give us a second, and here it comes again. The

8:56

rule we just made up and never committed

8:58

to the guidelines, we're just going

9:00

to pull that back again. You have to do

9:02

something. You can't just have an app that has

9:04

a login wall without

9:06

letting customers try it. And we were

9:08

like, again,

9:10

what? You had three years since

9:13

you made up this rule last time to

9:15

put it into the guidelines so that people

9:17

like us would actually have some clarity as

9:19

to what does it take to get approved.

9:23

If we had known up front that

9:25

you had to have a spurious demo

9:27

mode again still after these years,

9:29

we would just have put that in. You

9:31

could have saved all this aggravation, you could have saved all

9:33

this to do it. I still think it

9:36

would be intolerable if that existed, but at least

9:38

we'd know where Apple stands, which is really what

9:40

gets me so fired up here, is that

9:42

Apple pretends, gives the pretext as

9:44

though their app store review process

9:47

is governed by something resembling

9:49

laws, that there's a rule of law, that you

9:51

can look up what it takes to get approved,

9:53

and if you do the things Apple will tell

9:55

you to, you will get in. And no, that

9:57

is not true at all. The process is entirely

10:00

complete. capricious. There's a thick

10:02

leave of guidelines that

10:04

you can look at and try to read the tea

10:06

leaves and what it takes to get in, but it

10:08

doesn't actually govern what gets in and what doesn't get

10:10

in. So we

10:12

end up in this situation where they come out with this bullshit again and

10:15

we go like, okay, here we go

10:17

again. First of all, all

10:19

this stuff is going on, right? We

10:21

get the initial rejection

10:24

just from Bill who calls

10:26

us right in the morning, then they

10:29

wait the whole day until end of

10:31

business Friday and I think like five

10:33

minutes to five, they send us the

10:35

official written rejection and we go like,

10:38

yeah, Apple, okay, this is how you're trying

10:40

to bury this once more. You're just gonna

10:43

get like a hide it in under the

10:45

weekend and we're like, okay, whatever.

10:48

Yes, you have all the power. You can

10:50

absolutely make a stance and we will dance.

10:52

So dance we did through the weekend to

10:54

come up with this, it has to do

10:56

something bullshit where we was inspired

11:00

by a physical

11:02

calendar that someone made to

11:05

record the history of Apple and

11:07

we thought like, you know what, that's a good idea. So

11:10

we did our own research. We

11:12

didn't use anything from that actual calendar, just the

11:14

idea that, hey, you know what, there are people

11:16

who care about Apple's history. I care about Apple's

11:18

history. Apple's history is in part my history when

11:20

it comes to computers. I've been using Apple for

11:22

what is gonna be now, 23 years. I was

11:24

an extremely

11:27

enthusiastic evangelist for

11:30

Apple and

11:32

has been basically ever since I converted.

11:35

I don't know how many people back

11:37

in the early Ruby on Rails days

11:39

who saw me using TextMate, the editor

11:41

on a MacBook and they switched from

11:43

Windows. I remember when I was in

11:46

college, I basically converted half my class

11:48

to Apple. We're all using

11:50

PCs and here I come with my white

11:52

clamshell iBook and

11:54

people are like, what kind of computer is that? And I

11:56

think the prices of Apple because I like the stuff they

11:58

make. So Apple's history

12:01

is important to me. It's important to us. It's

12:03

important to a lot of people. So we put

12:05

that in We basically a little

12:07

cheeky. All right fair. We made it a little cheeky

12:09

that you could either log in This is what we

12:11

want people to do We want people to go to

12:13

hey calm buy a subscription then download the app and

12:15

lock in but all right It has to do something

12:18

So there's a little link at the bottom if you

12:20

don't have an account you can see Apple's history if

12:22

you click that You get to see our calendar how

12:24

it works how to detail pages work. It's gorgeous And

12:27

you see Apple's history in there and

12:29

that's what we submitted yesterday

12:33

Right bright early Monday morning the team had worked

12:35

through the weekend we get that in It

12:39

goes into review almost right away. I think

12:41

like within 40 minutes or something the little

12:43

status change Takes in

12:45

and says in review and then

12:47

this morning. It's finally approved now Was

12:50

it approved because the goodness of apples hardened because

12:52

we just put that in there and they were

12:54

like yep you Complied

12:56

with the guidelines we had on our head

12:59

And that was exactly what we did. No, of course it

13:01

didn't it went through in large

13:04

part because we are loud and obnoxious

13:07

Wasps and if you stick your

13:10

goddamn paw Into

13:12

our high we will sting and

13:15

we tried to do the best thing we

13:17

can again We're small independent software maker,

13:19

right? Like we don't we don't

13:21

have lobbyists We don't have a bunch of people

13:23

we could sort of pull around and maneuver So

13:25

we got to just shout which through all the

13:27

channels we got and shout we did and

13:30

I think this was done you think Apple

13:32

would have perhaps like Remembered

13:35

the stings they got back in 2020 When

13:37

they were also adamant that we were just gonna be dead and

13:39

we were gonna get kicked out of the after so unless we

13:41

paid The 30% and lo and behold

13:44

after a few weeks of

13:46

just a torrent of bad press They

13:49

relented and they came up with a new rule

13:51

basically just for us and thankfully also other people

13:53

who fall into the same Category and

13:56

now we've done the same thing again Grouper

13:59

on daring fire. The ball just remarked on

14:01

this this morning or yesterday. Y.

14:04

Y. Y you doing this?

14:07

First. Of all isn't be doing this to anyone. You.

14:09

Should have clear guidelines. The guidelines should

14:11

be fair and they should be applied

14:14

equally to everyone. See kid lead in

14:16

a bunch of high flying apps like

14:18

Netflix or Salesforce or whatever that sister

14:20

logged in screens and they aim to

14:22

a bunch of smaller and smaller make

14:25

is no you can't do that because

14:27

off reasons I only have recorded inside

14:29

my head that says. That. That's

14:31

going to a lot of people the

14:33

wrong way, including lawmakers, including regulators, including

14:35

developers who just go like, okay, I'm

14:37

Apple's You've done a lot of good

14:40

things. This is, by the way, really

14:42

important to stress here. I don't hate

14:44

Apple. Of we. Don't hate Apple. I

14:47

am on an Apple right now. I'd

14:49

use apple stuff all the time. I

14:51

think apple makes really good stuff. They.

14:53

Make really good computers, They make really

14:55

good phones and that's why it's so

14:58

extra frustrating that you doing this to

15:00

which should be your biggest fear is.

15:02

Who. Are in many ways your biggest fear is

15:04

not just us by the way, but your customers.

15:07

We. Have all these customers. As I said

15:09

with since the thousands of customers on hit

15:11

eighty five percent of the music of Apple

15:14

devices, So when Apple try to get at

15:16

us. Begin. At their own customers,

15:18

they deny their own customers access to use

15:20

the software they want to use. When you

15:23

buy a thousand dollar phone. He

15:25

should be able to use the headcount if you want.

15:27

It can be up to apple as whether you can

15:30

use as a cow there are use Apple's calendar or

15:32

use Google calendar that simply up to the consumer because

15:34

it we should be able to say i want to

15:36

pay. One hundred dollars a year

15:39

to get amazing email encounter from our

15:41

from this crew. Over thirty Some signals.

15:44

And then just like be allowed to use

15:46

the computer that they bought in their pocket

15:48

to do whatever. They. want that's

15:50

not the world we're living in right

15:52

now but fortunately maybe it will be

15:55

soon i mean this is the irony

15:57

of of the time and again speech

15:59

years later Last time the

16:01

timing was really bad for Apple because they

16:03

had the WWDC, the Worldwide Developer Conference, coming

16:05

up at exactly the same time. They had

16:07

all this spotlight on them and

16:09

they want to go out at WWDC and say,

16:12

look, developers, we're really great to work with and

16:14

you should build for the Apple platform. And then

16:16

here there's this case that Davey says,

16:18

you're horrible to developers and if you misstep the

16:20

guidelines we have in our heads, we will squash

16:22

you. Didn't

16:24

really square. That was an out

16:27

of tune melody. Here we have now

16:29

again the

16:32

Department of Justice in the United States is,

16:34

according to a report that the New York

16:36

Times put out what, Friday last

16:38

week, about to launch a major

16:41

antitrust lawsuit against Apple

16:44

on all of these issues. All right, so

16:46

that's hanging there. In two months, I

16:48

believe it's in March or early April,

16:50

the Digital Markets Act kicks in in

16:53

the EU. This is the act

16:55

that basically bans Apple from using

16:57

this tying that they can't force developers to

16:59

use their in-app payments. It

17:02

makes Apple and Google and other systemic

17:05

gatekeepers or whatever they call it

17:07

have alternate ways of installing software

17:10

that they have to allow other

17:12

app stores. If Epic

17:14

Games want to have an app store, a game store

17:16

perhaps, they should be allowed to do so. Microsoft

17:19

want to have a game store, they should be allowed to do so. Side

17:22

loading, which side loading is such

17:24

a funny term by the way. It sounds like

17:26

kind of sneaky. It sounds like side alley. It

17:29

sounds like something like you have to do in a trench coat, when

17:32

in reality it just means you can install

17:34

whatever software you want, just like the Mac.

17:37

On the Mac, you can download software from the internet

17:39

that doesn't go through Apple and you can install that.

17:42

The timing is just really strange. It

17:44

doesn't seem like Apple was going to gain anything. Apple

17:47

did not gain anything except tremendously

17:49

bad press. I think two million

17:51

people saw that original tweet thread

17:53

I put out. And

17:56

you're like, again, why? Apple,

17:58

let's... Let's just get over

18:00

this bullshit. Okay,

18:02

David, I'm going to let you dispel a myth

18:04

that I saw online, which is that the app

18:07

was rejected because of a login issue? Like

18:09

the person reviewing it didn't have correct login

18:12

information? Tell us about that. Yes. Where

18:15

did that come from? I mean, it

18:17

comes from a deep-seated belief among some

18:19

developers that Apple is actually really right.

18:22

That their livelihood perhaps depends on Apple. They

18:24

love Apple. So

18:26

they can't see Apple being this bully that

18:28

they actually are. So they come up with

18:30

all these reasons for why actually it's your

18:32

fault that Apple is kicking you in the

18:34

teeth. And one of those explanations that

18:36

came up was like, oh, it doesn't do anything. Yeah, of

18:39

course. Like the reviewer has to be able to use the

18:41

app. Yeah, well, duh. We've

18:43

been using this process for literally a

18:45

decade. The Basecamp app is

18:47

a login wall. It has been so for

18:49

over a decade. Whenever we submit a new

18:52

build, we supply login credentials to

18:54

that reviewer. Because this

18:56

is a server-side powered system, we can see

18:58

whether the reviewer logs in. We could see

19:00

the reviewer logged in. We could see that

19:02

they tried the app and actually gave it

19:04

a fair shake. So that wasn't

19:06

it. Some of the other kind

19:09

of calls to this, again, have been along

19:11

the same lines where people are so invested,

19:15

I guess, in the narrative that

19:17

like Apple, I'm on team Apple.

19:19

Like I'm an Apple fan. I'm

19:21

an Apple person. Therefore, it's very

19:23

intellectually painful if Apple does something

19:25

that just objectively seems objectionable. And

19:28

then they come up with this stuff. But it

19:30

just wasn't the case. We did all our

19:32

homework. This is not our first rodeo. First

19:35

of all, we've been publishing in the app store for

19:37

over a decade. We have a lot of apps that's

19:39

gone in there without any trouble at all. We just

19:42

went through this whole debacle three years ago.

19:44

We did all our homework and double-checked it

19:46

before we submit it. Okay. Another

19:49

thing I wanted to bring up, you

19:51

mentioned that we got the second rejection

19:53

Friday, late Friday, and the team

19:56

worked over the weekend and got something else

19:58

out on Monday working over the weekend. We saw

20:00

a lot of comments on Twitter about

20:02

people not thinking that was 37 Signals Way.

20:04

Tell me your thoughts about that. Yeah.

20:07

So we have a book from 2018 called It Doesn't

20:09

Have to Be Crazy at Work. And even just the

20:11

title there is just so delicious for something like Twitter

20:13

or X, right? You just go like, gotcha! I

20:16

gotcha! Like all this stuff

20:18

you made, like it's all invalid because

20:20

some people worked over the weekend. Now,

20:23

I actually went through to read

20:25

the chapter that addresses this in the book yesterday

20:27

because I was like, what

20:30

do we actually say? And what we say is if

20:33

you're constantly pushing the envelope, running it

20:35

to the max, working 80-hour weeks, working

20:37

through the weekends, there's something wrong in

20:39

your business. And 100% that's

20:42

true. What we also say is

20:45

that occasionally, rarely, there

20:47

will be a crisis that you

20:49

should show up to fix. If

20:53

our servers are offline on

20:55

a freaking – if our servers are offline

20:58

Christmas Eve, if

21:00

they're offline Thanksgiving dinner,

21:02

you can rest assured that there will

21:05

be people from 37 Signals working to

21:07

fix that problem. Now, this wasn't Christmas

21:09

Eve, this wasn't Thanksgiving dinner, but this

21:12

was akin to an outage. Our

21:15

hay users who have gotten access to the hay

21:17

calendar, which by the way, we haven't called out

21:19

fully to everyone, we're rushing through to get through

21:22

that this week. But the people who did have

21:24

access and started using the

21:26

calendar for them not to be able to

21:28

use the calendar on their phone is

21:31

a kind of outage. Now, it's

21:33

not the same outage that is if our

21:35

servers are offline, but it is a kind

21:38

of inaccessibility to our servers against the expectations

21:40

you would have as a customer of hay.

21:43

So we got a

21:45

team together, we asked

21:47

them to put in extra, and

21:50

they put in a weekend's worth of work to

21:52

get us through this, which by the way, validated

21:55

instantly right after, given the fact we were

21:57

able to submit Monday morning and now the

21:59

app is open. is actually in the store.

22:01

So should this be

22:04

the normal mode of operation? Should every

22:06

weekend be something you plow through when

22:08

just like because you want to know?

22:10

Sometimes external factors are imposed upon you

22:12

and you should react to those things.

22:14

So I think you can

22:17

also get so precious in your sense that

22:19

like no one should ever

22:21

work a day long if there's a problem,

22:23

no one should ever show up for a

22:26

weekend if things are on fire. What?

22:30

You think normal people never work a

22:32

weekend? You think normal people never work

22:34

like a day extra at something that

22:36

that warrants it? Of course they do

22:38

all the time. This is this kind

22:40

of pressure overly precious bullshit that people

22:42

who make hundreds of thousands of dollars

22:44

a year can lull their little brains

22:46

into believing is actually right and just

22:48

that like no everything is invalid if

22:51

you make people work over the weekend.

22:53

So yeah

22:56

it was good. Sometimes it's a

22:58

crisis. You should show up for the crisis. You should fix

23:00

the crisis and they should make sure you don't have a

23:02

crisis all the time. Now thankfully perhaps

23:04

we don't come up with new products every

23:06

five seconds and try to get those into

23:09

the app stores. We've been working on the

23:11

hay calendar for a year. These

23:13

are people working a weekend

23:16

to see the fruits of all

23:18

of that. That year worth of

23:20

effort actually come to fruition. Do

23:22

you know what's more frustrating than

23:24

working a year and feeling tired?

23:26

It's to see that that year

23:28

was for nothing at least

23:30

yet. To see that you can't get

23:32

the satisfaction of something you built into the hands

23:34

of customers who have you built it for. So

23:38

we will absolutely show up to fight for that

23:40

to put the stuff that we've built the satisfaction

23:42

there is intellectually and business wise to get products

23:44

that we've made into the hands of customers we

23:46

intended them for. Okay and

23:48

last question before we wrap out. You mentioned new

23:51

products obviously the hay calendar is coming out and

23:53

we're working on a new product under the once

23:55

umbrella and I understand that that once product won't

23:57

have these app stores shenanigans.

24:00

Is that a true story? It

24:02

is. With once.com, we're planning this

24:04

whole sweet series of products. We're

24:06

almost ready with the first one. We've actually already

24:09

started the beta testing last year on it, but

24:11

then kind of got a little distracted here for

24:13

a second, dealing with

24:15

these App Store shenanigans. But

24:19

there, we're going to route around it. We're going

24:21

to route around it. There's something called Progressive Web

24:23

Applications, which is a terrible

24:25

moniker. It's abbreviated PWA, which sounds

24:27

like a freaking insurgency group in

24:30

Nicaragua or something. But

24:33

PWA is a suite of technologies

24:35

that allow you to create essentially

24:37

what feels like native applications that

24:39

you can install on your phones,

24:42

where you can get push notifications and

24:45

all these other things without going through

24:47

the App Store bureaucrats, without risking your

24:50

life or business or stress levels

24:52

to that approval process. And

24:54

that's what we're going to pursue with the once.com stuff.

24:57

It's not 100% there. Let's

25:00

not kid anyone, least of all ourselves. The

25:03

kind of fidelity, UI fidelity

25:05

that you can achieve with native

25:07

applications is still higher. We don't

25:09

have any plans of not

25:12

doing native apps for Basecamp, not doing native

25:14

apps for Hey. I don't think the technology

25:16

is quite there yet for those kinds of

25:18

apps. But there are other kinds

25:20

of applications where it is

25:23

there. Where the bar is good enough, where

25:25

we can then push the envelope

25:27

on what's possible with these PWA

25:29

technologies. We can show people, hopefully,

25:31

that there's a whole series, classes

25:33

of applications that don't need the

25:35

App Store, that don't need the

25:37

applications. And in fact, it

25:39

can be much better for

25:42

consumers, especially if you install applications like

25:44

once.com is all about. You run these

25:46

applications yourself. We don't have the data.

25:49

We don't run it through our services.

25:51

So the fact that PWA technology,

25:54

for example, can allow a company

25:57

in Europe to be in full compliance

25:59

with the GDA, by

26:01

sending their own push notifications with perhaps

26:03

sensitive data straight from their servers to

26:06

the recipient not going through our company

26:09

is a real win. So super excited about

26:11

that. It was it

26:14

is a little funny that we have these two products

26:16

at the same time we'd be pushing at them because

26:18

we're bigger company now than we were we're far more

26:20

capable company than we were but we

26:23

have had to distract a little bit of the

26:25

attention here to the hey calendar launch but we'll

26:27

get back to once in about five seconds. Well,

26:30

there'll be more to come on that soon

26:32

for now We're gonna wrap it up. Rework

26:34

is a production 37 signals You can find

26:36

show notes and transcripts on our website at

26:38

37signals.com/podcast Full video episodes are on YouTube

26:41

and Twitter and if you have a question for Jason

26:43

or David about a better way to work and Run

26:45

your business or app store

26:47

shenanigans Leave us a voicemail at 708-628-7850

26:51

You can also text that number or you can send

26:53

us an email to rework at 37signals.com You