Basecamp founders’ e-mail service Hey is preventing with Apple once more — this time over the rejection of its new calendar app from the App Retailer. Apple’s reasoning is much like when Cupertino-based tech big rejected Hey’s e-mail app 4 years in the past — non-paying customers can’t use the app after downloading it. Plus, new customers can’t join via Hey’s calendar app.
Final week, Basecamp launched an built-in calendar service with Hey, together with a brand new standalone app for it. On Saturday, Hey’s co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson posted on X that Apple has rejected Hey’s standalone calendar app.
Apple requires apps to permit customers to join the service and presumably pay for the subscription if wanted. If customers pay via in-app purchases Apple will get a 30% (or much less in some circumstances) minimize. These guidelines enable some apps akin to Netflix, Kindle, and Spotify to let customers create accounts exterior the app.
In 2020, Apple first rejected Hey’s e-mail app as a result of customers couldn’t join the service on the app. So each corporations got here to a compromise the place customers might obtain and begin utilizing Hey with a randomized e-mail ID. To improve, they needed to pay for the service via the browser.
In a weblog put up, Hansson argues that a number of apps like Google Calendar and Netflix are logins gated with individuals paying for the service exterior Apple’s ecosystem. Moreover, he says that Apple makes use of one iCloud ID to offer a subscription to a collection of apps. So Hey’s calendar app needs to be allowed on the App Retailer.
“So what’s going to occur? I don’t know, however I do know that we’ll maintain preventing. We’re by no means going to roll over and pay Apple 30% in safety cash to be left alone. Final time we discovered a means, and we are going to once more,” he stated.
Apple didn’t instantly touch upon the story.
