Senior iOS engineer / consultant (12+ years). I build and fix iOS and Vision Pro apps from medical devices and high-traffic consumer apps to vibecoded startups struggling to pass App Store reviews.
Senior iOS engineer / consultant (12+ years). I build and rescue iOS and Vision Pro apps that have to work: medical devices, high-traffic consumer apps, and anything where your previous freelancer said “not possible”.
I am usually brought in for the awkward parts: background reliability, performance/crash triage, architecture refactors, and migrations (SwiftUI, TCA, Swift Concurrency).
Available for MVP builds, agency oversight, joining your team for a sprint or three, and due diligence (I read the codebase and tell you what’s solid, what’s duct tape, and what it’ll take to fix).
Hi, OP here. Not sure what else to add beyond the first paragraph of the article:
> The rating itself is fine: the target audience is well past that age anyway. What baffles me is the logic.
I don't mind the 18+ label, even though it's up to the users what they use the app for, whether it's tracking sex, a partner's health, or personal wellbeing.
But I do find the history of age ratings and categories in the App Store and the limits they have to be quite hilarious, and figured I might as well write them down.
Hi OP! I’ll share what I mentioned below in hopes of a response from you directly, because I’m genuinely curious to hear what you think:
Seems like people should be of whatever age we consider mature before they start capturing intimate data about themselves on random platforms. If we don’t think you’re able to understand the risks of pursuing your reproductive impulses, do we think you can measure the risks of sharing data about those impulses on a platform you don’t control?
Local data or not, if I were the steward of a marketplace I’d use that position to create this kind of teaching moment for pre-developed consumers. If young people had been warned since the mid 2000s of how much of their intimacy they were handing over to Meta, ByteDance, etc. before they started, the world would certainly be better off.
Hey! I don’t disagree that people of any age should think twice before putting personal data (intimate or not) into any platform.
My point wasn’t about lowering the age rating. The issue is that Apple doesn’t have a real category for this kind of wellbeing at all. The age gate itself is sensible, but what’s funny is why it exists. It’s not "because we carefully considered how to protect teens’ data", it’s "because in 2009 the Store was drowning in farting apps, and we’ve been patching around that ever since."
Urm, did you read a different article then the one linked?
Because there's isn't really an argument innit - at least none that I took notice of. Isn't it just exploring the reasons why it is like it is today? They even made it abundantly clear in the beginning (and in the comments here) that the rating is fine for the app
And for what conceivable reason would this need to have sure underage people aren't using it?
A period tracker has relevance in the context of a sexual relationship, but there is really nothing about it that needs to be censored from underage people. It is not explicit content. It's a specialized journal, that's it
I bet that the ratings are dictated not by usability but by liability.
Yes, people younger than 18 engage in sex, but this has different legal consequences than for people past 18, and Apple has no interest to wade through that legal quagmire.
> Hi, OP here. Not sure what else to add beyond the first paragraph of the article:
I would imagine that the confusion arose because they read past that sentence. You wrote that you don’t mind that the app you specifically made for adults to use got the rating that it did and then sort of talk about how you don’t find the rating system to be rational.
I couldn’t tell if the subject of this article is “I think my intimacy tracking app shouldn’t have an adult rating because a user could use it for general wellbeing” or “I don’t like Fortnite”
That’s fair feedback, thank you. The point I was trying to make wasn’t "my app deserves a lower rating", it was "I built something for adults and realised there isn’t actually a correct category for it at all."
Once I noticed that gap, I went digging into the history to understand why the App Store age ratings and categories are the way they are, hence this archeological detour of a post.
Root cellars are far more stable than a ground-floor garage in my case: steady temperature throughout the year, low airflow. Some wooden cabinets are also superior to modern chambers, i.e cedar acts like a humidity buffer, which is why miso makers still swear by cedar koji boxes.
To call it a wooden cabinet might be a wee bit generous. Actually a broken wardrobe he probably found on the side of the road with broken hinges on one of the doors so he nailed it shut. :lol:
I wish. No-fault evictions aren't a thing in Scotland, but I'd still struggle to explain the whole "I plumbed a cold line for salami" thing to the landlord.
OP here. Yeah, "copyright law" was a lazy shorthand, but it reads better than "tortious interference."
PureGym's T&Cs [1] have a ridiculously long "PIN abuse policy" (probably meant to stop people sharing with mates). They can cancel memberships or even retroactively charge for gym use if you "knowingly provided your PIN to another individual."
I'm not a lawyer and don't fancy being the test case for whether entering your PIN on a third-party website/app counts as "knowingly providing" it. Given how their app works, I suspect they might just ban a bunch of accounts instead.
Though now that I think about it, the squat racks are always packed, so maybe I should just distribute the app to people who go at the same time as me.
> I'm not a lawyer and don't fancy being the test case for whether entering your PIN on a third-party website/app counts as "knowingly providing" it.
I guess I'm assuming that you would design the iOS app to collect and store the PIN number on the device, and never ever share it, since (if I read the post correctly) that's all you'd need to get to basic auth. I take your point that that might still be considered "sharing with a third party" but honestly I suspect that (a) they wouldn't notice for a long long time and (b) they would typically start by sending a c&d, not hiring a team top-notch lawyers and going straight to court unless you're really wealthy and there's some prize to be had for all of those legal fees.
Yeah, screenshot on Monday, messed with the app that evening, tried using it Tuesday morning -- dead.
I've seen people on PureGym's Twitter successfully refreshing screenshots weekly though, and the API response suggests the same.
That being said, I couldn't find a validation endpoint to check if mine got invalidated by something specific (maybe signing out?) or if there's some other magic happening.
I wonder if opening the app invalidated it, and those people who had it working just screenshot once.
My gym has a similar system but I realised it's time based and the app functions without Internet. I installed the app onto an old android with no sim, logged in at home over WiFi and it successfully regenerated QRs without data
CV: https://drobinin.com/consulting
Email: hn@drobinin.com
Senior iOS engineer / consultant (12+ years). I build and fix iOS and Vision Pro apps from medical devices and high-traffic consumer apps to vibecoded startups struggling to pass App Store reviews.
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