The hypocrisy at the end of the article is astounding: "Right now, we’re not planning on it. [rebuilding their app]. Our APIs make it easy for anyone else to build one, though. (Our old app is open source if you’d like an example to build upon. Just respect our license and don’t put ads in it.)"
They blatantly violated the agreement for obtaining the pre-release hardware, and then expect people to honor their own license terms?
IMHO, they are extremely lucky the worst thing that happened was their developer account getting pulled.
Actually, under their license (GPL) you are allowed to sell it, as long as you include the source when selling it. Most prominent example: Linux CDs sold before the Internet was fast and ubiquitous.
Why isn't it hypocrisy to expect others to respect license agreements yet blatantly violate them themselves for publicity? Yes, the terms aren't the same, but, so?
I would compare the apple hardware agreement they violated to software agreements which forbid analysis, reverse engineering, or even benchmarking (there's some notable enterprisey software which forbids conducting benchmarks and sharing the results).
I would not condone redistributing copies of software or significant portions thereof in a way which violates the license, whether it be a copyleft license or a commercial license. If apple distributed gerber files for the PCB of the new hardware device, or original CAD schematics it uses to manufacture parts, under some license, I'd also want the terms of the distribution of that to be respected.
But this is something of a different nature. It's taking hardware apart and seeing what's inside and sharing that researched information rather freely on the internet. This is not a copy of source code or hardware schematic. This is learned information. It's not vandalism - there is no expectation that any dev kits be returned, each recipient can use theirs exclusively. This is something everyone everywhere should always have the right to do. And iFixit does, more or less.
What sucks is that Apple can retaliate by exerting their complete and arbitrary control over what software millions of people are permitted to run on their own devices. That's really messed up. This is just one more great example, in case you don't understand yet.
> But this is something of a different nature. It's taking hardware apart and seeing what's inside and sharing that researched information rather freely on the internet.
> This is something everyone everywhere should always have the right to do. And iFixit does, more or less.
Most people get their devices by purchasing them when they are released. iFixit have been given the enormous privilege of being sent a developer unit.
> What sucks is that Apple can retaliate by exerting their complete and arbitrary control over what software millions of people are permitted to run on their own devices.
Apple aren't "retaliating". iFixit broke the developer terms. Their developer account was thus suspended. That developer account happened to contain their app.
> They blatantly violated the agreement for obtaining the pre-release hardware, and then expect people to honor their own license terms?
I assume that most people were taught things like "Two wrongs don't make a right", or some other Aesopian adage at some point in their lives to similar effect.
Just because they violated Apple's NDA/EULA terms does not entitle anyone else to violate theirs.
Violating NDA/EULA terms result in repercussions — one it sounds like they were almost certain they would incur. Don't make this some facile argument about how "two wrongs don't make a right."
Also, your last statement makes absolutely no sense. "Just because they violated Apple's NDA/EULA terms does not entitle anyone else to violate theirs". Wut?
>IMHO, they are extremely lucky the worst thing that happened was their developer account getting pulled.
What else can Apple do? Send the device teardown Police?
They never acted like they did not violate the terms of the agreement, or that Apple did some injustice. I don't see the hypocrisy. Even if they were hypocritical, it is an overrated vice. Asking people to honour their agreement does not become wrong just because they are hypocrites.
Well, everyone breaks rules. It's like saying they're hypocritical because sometimes they don't obey parking laws but expect people to obey their licensing terms.
I think the idea here is that being able to fix your own devices rather than put them in a landfill is a moral stance and such rules deserve to be broken.
Of course it does. I may or may not choose to buy X product because of how easy or difficult it is to take apart and repair myself (and that's not limited to iDevices, as iFixit covers many consumer products beyond Apple's lineup). iFixit is offering a valuable service to me, the consumer, with their preemptive teardowns.
> Of course it does. I may or may not choose to buy X product because of how easy or difficult it is to take apart and repair myself
Then Ifixit should have waited until it's available on the market then did the tear down. They consumed a valuable and limited resource that is known as the dev kit. A dev kit, which I may remind you, could have ended up in the hands of an actual developer and put to real use. Instead, they broke the rules and tore down a product that's not on the market yet.
They got off easy, and anyone who attempts to argue that they are in the right simply have not done their homework regarding the matter.
iFixit traditionally does teardown on the first day of availability. If you need to see a teardown before buying, you just have to wait 24 hours after availability. You'll need to do that anyway in case Apple changes something between dev unit and production unit.
Sure iFixit provides a great service. I happily support them by buying tools and parts from them. "Public service" simply isn't a valid reason for this teardown. It was regrettably thoughtless of them to do this just because they can.
For additional context, please note that the Apple TV device is provided to developers for $1 (would have been free if not for address verification) under the NDA with the specific intent of developing apps for it. It's not like repairing their own device they paid full price for.
The OP isn't using it as a justification for what occurred. They're rightly stating that iFixit breaking a license agreement doesn't then give other people the right to break a license agreement (in this case the license of their app) with iFixit.
If you start going down the rabbit hole of "You violated their license terms so I'm going to violate your license terms" then things would fall apart very quickly. Is it morally OK to pirate Justin Bieber's music because he faced drugs charges? Is it reasonable to shoplift from Walmart because they broke a contract with a supplier?
iFixit broke their contact with Apple, and for that they should (and apparently have) faced repurcussions. That doesn't give anyone the moral right not to respect the license they publish their app source code under (by putting ads on it or selling it).
I don't fully understand the hypocrisy here when they acknowledged their mistake (or at least in the article, moreso a risk they chose to take) and are living with the consequences.
I don't see any contrition on their part. They're trying to have it both ways – the tone of the article is clearly engineered to raise the heckles of people who are sympathetic to the "Apple is authoritarian" meme without explicitly saying so.
"In the meantime, we will continue to support our Android app" they say. Not subtle at all.
I support iFixit in their quest to get useful information about hardware to the masses. If you own a device, why shouldn't you be able to disassemble and repair it yourself? And why shouldn't we be able to know what's inside that device?
But releasing a teardown of the new Apple TV (and breaking NDA while doing so) is not doing that since, critically, the device is not available for purchase yet. I feel like this move is hiding behind "technology wants to be free and open" while actually making a grab for clicks and views.
You're not a martyr for the cause of freedom in this case. Nobody was attacking you. Apple was holding the sword and you fell on it. Had you just waited until the device was released, it would be a different story.
iFixit are making it really hard to be on their side.
Yeah, I hope this doesn't damage whatever relationship iFixit may have with Apple, or in any other way inhibit the flow of information and resources for consumers to understand and fix their own devices.
I highly doubt they've ever had a relationship with Apple. I don't think they've ever gotten a prerelease iPhone - they just send someone to Australia where they launch first and do the teardown before they go on sale 12 hours later in the US.
Apple made it quite clear that the whole thing was under NDA and you were not to talk about it under any circumstances. This was mentioned repeatedly throughout the process.
I'm no fan of Apple's App Store policies, but this one is entirely iFixit's fault.
> I'm no fan of Apple's App Store policies, but this one is entirely iFixit's fault.
Not necessarily. It's not clear that Apple's rules were reasonable. If the dev unit is identical to the production ones then an NDA is unreasonable unless it was only under NDA until an embargo.
Why would you assume iFixit didn't violate the NDA? The NDA said you couldn't talk about your Apple TV developer hardware until the final Apple TV shipped. It hasn't shipped yet, and won't for a month or so, while iFixit already posted their teardown a week ago. That's a pretty obvious violation.
It's not like iFixit went to a store, bought something, tore it down, and are getting punished for publishing the pictures. They got prerelease hardware for free (technically for a dollar plus sales tax) in exchange for an agreement not to talk about that hardware for a while. Then they talked about it anyway.
Well, that's what they did. It's called lying (or in legalese, violation of contract) and the repercussions are that their relationship with Apple is damaged.
This might well be the last pre-release thing they ever receive from Apple. So, sure, things aren't black and white, but they didn't exactly leave room for Apple to respond positively, especially given Apple's rather well known positions on leaked information.
I love how a bunch of nerds get super upset over iFixit doing a teardown on prerelease hardware (lying, violation of contract (shrink wrap at that)). So much easier than getting upset about things that matter. I'd say it ranks about as high as jaywalking.
I see little room for shades of gray in a scenario where someone gives you $150 of hardware for free and all they ask in exchange is that you wait two months before talking about it.
To me it doesn't matter if the rules were unreasonable or not. If you accept an offer under specific rules, you have voluntarily bound yourself to them (moral, regardless of legal).
100% absolutely "necessarily". Ifixit broke the rules, and got a light punishment for it. It doesn't matter how you feel on the matter, or if the end product is the same as the dev kit.
They broke the rules, and saying things like "Not necessarily" is reckless and an uneducated statement, which is simply not acceptable in HN comment sections.
Thanks for the detail. It is interesting that violating an NDA about physical hardware results in getting your software pulled from a sibling app store. Clearly an android app would not be similarly affected. Though it does seems like they are getting a light punishment considering violating NDAs can have severe legal and financial consequences.
The tone I get from this post is that they knew there would be consequences to their actions and that they are apologizing that there users ended up being impacted. There is nothing in here saying "Apply totally screwed us, bring down the evil overlords."
I think this was really well written and had exactly the right tone. Please read past the first paragraph if you want to criticize.
What I take from this post is that they were ready to move away from their own mobile app anyway (like almost every other publisher who built an app over the past 5 years), and figured this would be an interesting and fun (and attention-generating) way to do so.
We can't see it in the App Store anymore, but how many downloads did the iFixit mobile app have? How many active users? What did it do that a mobile website did not? As they admit, not really anything.
But they're in good company there. There are a lot of content publisher apps still limping along in the App Store, despite delivering little value to their publishers.
Generally speaking, content apps lost and connecting apps won. Everyone just reads their content in their social network or aggregator now. NY Times has to inject their content into Facebook to grab mobile mindshare, even though they have had their own NY Times mobile app for years.
It also neatly solved iFixit's problem of having an app out there that they had abandoned and was giving users a defective experience. Pulling your own app from the store will make someone angry at you. Having Apple pull it is about ideal.
They could spend $100 for a new apple id, fix up the code enough to pass muster, and get it back in the store if they wanted, but like they say in the post, the mobile web is fine for what their app did and they don't want to spend any money on the app.
Tangential, it would be nice if Apple left a tombstone for vanished apps. If I read somewhere to get the iFixit app, I'd go to the store now and download an app named "iFixit!" which is apparently some random collection of manuals.
10 months ago I accidentally let my membership lapse, and I am pretty sure that only the paid apps were pulled. If I am not paying attention in January maybe I will test it again to confirm this winter.
I would say the title is misleading. Their developer account was cancelled because they violated the NDA. Apple didn't "pull the app", the app becoming unavailable is just a side effect of the dev account being cancelled.
iFixit could get the app back in the store in a few days by signing up for a new dev account. But they don't want to do that because, as they say, the app is buggy and they want to focus on the mobile site anyway.
So, the title is clickbait. Apple didn't censor the iFixit app. But no one would read an article titled "Apple terminates developer account after contract violation".
iFixit, I love what you do, so please don't compromise your integrity by breaking license agreements that companies try to get you into. You have the power to refuse those agreements and post them for the world to see. If you find yourself breaking them, please don't post blog posts with witty remarks and ask that people abide by your own licenses.
Your mission is so important. You have gone so far in holding companies accountable for e-waste and sustainability of their products. Please don't screw it up with stupid mistakes like this.
I would agree. It didn't have the crying and crisis and conspiracy tone that usually accompanies these posts. They knew what they were doing, and the tone was "it was totally worth it". Kudos to them for putting their grown-up pants on.
I don't know that I'd call it "putting their grown-up pants on" to receive free hardware in exchange for an agreement not to talk about that hardware, then publish a teardown of that hardware anyway. Keeping your promises counts for something too.
No, I'd agree that's a bit ethically questionable. I guess I'm so used to developers acting like entitled children that when someone doesn't take that approach, it's a breath of fresh air (though in a way it's kinda like an honest politician, it's a bit sad when what should be the baseline becomes extraordinary)
Maybe you're thinking of something else, but in my experience when people talk about developers "acting like entitled children" it's because those developers got screwed over by Apple for no good reason, exhausted every internal avenue for redress, and decided to take their grievance public. (Been there, done that.)
At least it's a breath of fresh air to see Apple smacking somebody down for an actual, legitimate violation, instead of the usual imagined nonsense they do.
I'm not speaking of Apple specifically; I'm referring to examples where someone blatantly knew of the risk they were taking (think violating NDA, using copyrighted content, or basing their business entirely on someone else's content) and then crying conspiracy when the rug was pulled out from underneath them. (the app store situation you described obviously being a different kind of situation)
Gotcha, and I agree with your assessment on those. I've seen a lot of pro-Apple arguments characterizing developers with IMO legitimate gripes as "whiny" and that's immediately what I thought of here, but glad to be wrong in this case.
Yes. Unless they had some specific agreement with Apple to do a teardown and have time for research about the specific components pre-release, then they were under the same exact NDA that everyone that signed up to their developer unit pre-release lottery was under.
They even stated that they knew they had signed an NDA, but felt that publishing their teardown information was "more important" than the NDA.
[Off topic, curious bit in the original teardown:]
"We noticed a distinct lack of cables connecting the power supply to the logic board. We're theorizing the power is either transmitted by magic, or through the heat sink screw posts."
Please don't accuse anyone who disagrees with you of being an apologist; it's not a productive line of conversation.
That said, you're right that Apple doesn't like it when people ignore terms and conditions that they agree to wrt. prereleases. In an ideal world, nobody would care what we did with devices. But it's not like they're the only company doing it, and the terms are pretty clear.
I take more objection to your belief that iOS releases break apps frequently. In my experience, apps that break between releases are typically relying on undocumented behaviour or not following best practices. There are exceptions, but again - in most cases, follow the rules and nothing bad happens :)
I don't think apple is power mad in the way you're making them out to be, like some sort of megalomaniacal overlord tenting his fingers as he watches the mayhem unfold.
I think the just don't really care that much.
Because, after all, what else are you going to do? Not develop for the iOS ecosystem? I mean, they even named their platform with another well known (amongst tech folk) platform ... I don't think they're evil, so much as they've inherited the Jobsian condescension and indifference.
I love this story. iFixit knowingly violates a messed up TOS, and the only outcome that happens is their app is taken down, which results in free press.
Even if you call the TOS an NDA (which iFixit didn't post, which is kind of annoying), you do have to wonder, what did Apple expect to happen? iFixit has been publishing teardowns and helping people repair Apple products for close to a decade.
Wow. This is how you write an announcement delivering bad news with class. They are unapologetic for exercising their right to tinker, but feel no need to whine about Apple's response.
I would have to disagree. They broke an NDA by tearing down and publishing the internals of a device not available for public purchase. I don't they they had a legal 'right to tinker' with the developer unit they received. It'd be a lot different if they bought an already released device from a store and did the same thing. With that being said, their response just sounds like they're trying to save face after screwing up.
I actually think they should be apologetic. The developer unit they were sent (for free^Wone dollar) was covered under an NDA, which expressly forbid talking about the device until it was released (which it hasn't yet). So they did not have any right to tinker here (well, they can tinker, but no right to publicly release any info). I'm glad that they're not claiming that Apple was in the wrong for banning the developer account. But I think they should be taking more of a "we screwed up and violated the NDA, which in retrospect was pretty obvious" tone than the "so that happened. live and learn" tone they did take.
The reason is right there in the article - excessively crude or objectionable content.
If a porn website released their own video player as an app, you could call it a "very specialized web browser", but it would still obviously violate the app store ToS.
That is the stated reason but it doesn't make any sense. There are games in the app store where you actually pilot a drone and blow people up and Apple has let them be. Are we to believe that graphically simulating drone strikes is not crude or objectionable, while textually reporting on real drone strikes is?
You can believe what you want. Personally, I believe that either nobody has bothered to report the apps that are still up, or Apple doesn't give a shit about games because those are in their own bucket.
I think what it boils down to is that Apple shouldn't be deciding if newsworth facts are too obscene to be published. Should news apps be removed if they report on murders?
There's a huge difference between a news app that happens to cover murders and a "murder news" app that only covers that specific subset. The app in question is clearly much closer to the latter.
I've been deliberately avoiding talking about what should be banned. I would expect Apple to remove such an app from their store once they found out about it, yes.
> I've been deliberately avoiding talking about what should be banned.
Given that Apple's de-listing rationale is arbitrary and capricious, restricting one's comments to attempts to predict what Apple might ban provides zero value to any conversation.
If you wanted to call their app removal criteria arbitrary or capricious, you sure picked some bad examples.
Their offensiveness meter seems pretty obvious to me. The only thing I'd really worry about is "apps that duplicate OS features" since you really can't predict that without insider knowledge.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
No, just as Safari isn't removed because you can visit porn sites with it, but an app that was dedicated only to porn would be. Are you being intentionally obtuse?
No, I'm arguing that there should be a clear boundary between "acceptable" and "unacceptable" and trying to find out why a list of locations where people have been killed is objectionable to anyone.
Serious question: so what? The case you seem to be making in your comments is that it's irrational for all of us to be looking askance at this definition of "obscenity," but it's always been subjective, legally speaking. If we accept "controversial and potentially offensive" as obscene, that's a really broad definition, and I think it's worth pushing back on.
Obscenity is always going to be subjective. When it comes to what Apple is willing to sell in their store, it is their idea of obscenity that applies. At this point, I think they have made their stance clear enough that both you and I understand what gets apps banned.
I suspect what you and the others really want is for Apple to be bound by some kind of common carrier status that prohibits them from exercising their own judgment in what apps they publish. If you actually want that, you should say so. Arguing that Apple should have to publish apps it finds obscene just because the apps don't match your own definition of obscenity IS irrational. Well, strictly speaking, perhaps not irrational. Let's say shitty.
> I suspect what you and the others really want is for Apple to be bound by some kind of common carrier status...
Not just no, but "Hell no". What folks want from Apple is for their reviewers to behave like professionals. Professionals would provide a reasonably consistent, non-capricious application of the App Store rules. The current situation can be described roughly as:
"Your app will be de-listed if some app reviewer got up on the wrong side of the bed. The reviewer will point to a randomly selected clause in the TOU as the justification for the removal. You will be unable to get your app back in the App Store unless you have a large amount of social clout, or another reviewer who really dislikes the first one decides to override their decision. There are no guarantees that this process will not recur an unlimited number of times in the future."
This is not a good foundation on which to build a business relationship.
Could you attempt to use all the apps that aren't pulled, and the $X,XXX raked in monthly by folks from App Store revenues as counterexamples? Yes. Do those things negate my point? No.
They are consistent enough that I and most other developers have no trouble telling whether something is likely to get removed for being too offensive. The people that find their criteria capricious and unprofessional do things like ask "what about the New York Times app? They report on bad stuff!"
I'll fold up my reply to both of your replies to my comments here.
> They are consistent enough that I and most other developers have no trouble telling...
You and your cohort must have some pretty powerful psychic powers. :) You should sell Apple App Store Guideline Compliance services. You'd make a mint.
Nothing obliges you or I to accept their judgment without question. Why do you consider this a meaningful definition of obscene? (Also you're getting close to arguing by tautology here.)
I don't accept or agree with their judgment, but that's irrelevant, because I respect that it is their judgment, and Apple has the right to carry what they want in their own store.
It's sad to see that some companies so brazenly abuse their customer's trust, and there are no consequences for them.
Users trust Apple to protect them from malicious and perhaps from low-quality apps, and instead Apple abuses their power to try to silence those distributing information they don't like.
No, iFixit engaged in corporate behavior with a corporation - no trust ventured, none lost. Maybe there was harm - a lawsuit can settle that.
But Apple broke the trust of their users - by deleting a perfectly valid app in retaliation for a third party doing something unrelated. Any user wanting to see how to fix something is harmed by Apple's actions. Maybe iFixit provoked them, but Apple pulled the trigger.
This was NOT a retail box that iFixIt bought, it was a developer kit of an unfinished product meant to allow developer early access to the hardware to build apps for tvOS running on Apple. No customers or users will benefit from this because it is not meant for them.
The terms and conditions were very clear in the NDA that the developers have to sign to get an AppleTV developer kit.
Guess what, iFixit used their developer account to get that AppleTV and they violated the terms and conditions of that NDA.
Guess what happened when your specific iOS developer account is found to violate the NDA terms and condition? It gets banned, which is what happened.
Apple did exactly what they said will happen if the NDA terms and conditions were violated. That's all there is to it.
What would you suggest Apple should do? They can't let this blatant stomping over a perfectly reasonable NDA agreement pass. The other option they had would be to sue iFixit to oblivion which would have way bigger impact on the users.
Well, they could disappear an App that many people used, or ... anything else really. What they went with was pretty customer-hostile. It illustrates the problem with a closed eco-system. Two other parties have a fight and you end up stuck in the middle.
I don't know that they want to point this out, even if they think they're in the right.
They blatantly violated the agreement for obtaining the pre-release hardware, and then expect people to honor their own license terms?
IMHO, they are extremely lucky the worst thing that happened was their developer account getting pulled.
[Edited for clarity after feedback]