Saturday, 8 August 2026<\/p>\n
Yesterday I published an article titled \u201cApp Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours\u201d. I have retracted it. Its premise was so fundamentally wrong that there\u2019s no point merely correcting or editing it. Even the title, as I explain below, was inaccurate. Although the original is now retracted, I\u2019m not memory-holing it. The text of the original story is available, for transparency and accountability, in plain text<\/a> (Markdown, natch) and PDF<\/a> (preserving original presentation). Both of those versions include a preface at the top linking to this retraction. The URL<\/a> for the original story now redirects to this one that you are currently reading.<\/p>\n To the best of my recollection, this is the first post I\u2019ve retracted in the 24 years I\u2019ve been writing Daring Fireball. I hope it\u2019s the last. I was misled, both overtly and through omissions, in several ways, but what I publish is my responsibility, and I apologize for the error.<\/p>\n Terry Godier first came to my attention in February, when I linked to<\/a> his excellent interactive essay on RSS feed reader design, \u201cPhantom Obligation<\/a>\u201d, which essay introduced Current<\/a>, Godier\u2019s new RSS reader that he made to exemplify the ideas from his essay. Current is, deservedly, a bit of a breakout hit. (E.g., David Pierce, at The Verge, put it on a very short list<\/a> of iOS-exclusive indie apps that keep him from switching to Android.) In March I linked to another<\/a> interactive essay from Godier, \u201cThe Last Quiet Thing<\/a>\u201d, and again in April to a post<\/a> regarding the App Store\u2019s 5-star review system. I struck up an iMessage correspondence with Godier around when I first linked to his work.<\/p>\n Yesterday Godier posted \u201cBrowsers Have Standards, the App Store Has Judgment<\/a>\u201d. As originally published, that post contained these two paragraphs:<\/p>\n A while ago I tried to submit an iOS app for Dark Hours<\/a>, my It has no tarot function, no horoscopes, and nothing that I, or Those paragraphs, at this writing (August 8, 11:00 pm ET), have been deleted and replaced by this:<\/p>\n Note: the original version of this post had a section here about an You can now see the problem that has led me to fully retract my original post, given that my post was entirely predicated on the premise that Godier\u2019s original description of the rejected app was true\u2009\u2014\u2009that the app \u201chas no tarot function, no horoscopes, and nothing that I, or anyone else I\u2019ve asked, would associate with astrology.\u201d The truth is, the app, as originally submitted by Godier to the App Store (under the name \u201cAsterly\u201d, not \u201cDark Hours\u201d), was entirely dedicated to astrology, not astronomy, and did in fact include a \u201cTarot card of the day\u201d feature amongst other occultist horseshit.<\/p>\n The grounds of Apple\u2019s original App Store rejection of the app, and the rejection\u2019s upholding by the App Review Board, were correct.1<\/a> I wrongly took Godier at his word, both in his public blog post and in private iMessage correspondence yesterday, that the rejection wasn\u2019t just merely debatable, but completely and rather preposterously ungrounded. Whether Godier ever submitted a build of \u201cAsterly\u201d to the App Store that contained no occult horseshit and only the hard-science astronomy features that were present in his \u201cDark Hours\u201d website that was available for the last week, I don\u2019t know. But I have no reason to believe that he did.<\/p>\n My disdain for astrology<\/a> is so utter, and my esteem for Godier\u2019s previous work so high, that it simply never occurred to me that he might have actually made and submitted to the App Store an astrology app, let alone that he\u2019d then feign surprise and frustration that an astrology app was rejected for being an astrology app. I showed him a draft of my post before publication, to make sure I had the story straight, and he offered not a word of caution, only gratitude for my drawing attention to the matter.<\/p>\n It gets messier. Godier\u2019s astrology app that he submitted to the App Store back in January was named \u201cAsterly\u201d. That was still the name when the App Review Board upheld its rejection in April. According to Godier, frustrated by the App Store\u2019s rejection, he ported the astronomy version to the web, launching it last week<\/a> under the name \u201cDark Hours\u201d at the domain darkhours.io. (This is why it was incorrect for me, in the very title of my post, to claim that Apple had rejected an app named \u201cDark Hours\u201d. They rejected an app named \u201cAsterly\u201d and had never seen an app from Godier named \u201cDark Hours\u201d.) Yesterday, after I linked to Godier\u2019s post and Hacker News then linked to my post<\/a>, Godier\u2019s \u201cDark Hours\u201d (with a space) came to the attention<\/a> (and justifiable surprise) of Miguel Beher, creator of an open-source \u201castrophotography and dark-sky planner\u201d project named DarkHours (no space). Beher\u2019s GitHub project<\/a> contains the source code, and the actual web app is freely available at the domain darkhours.app<\/a>. In an uncomfortable exchange between Beher and Godier on Bluesky, Beher pointed out that Godier\u2019s Dark Hours had the same bug as Beher\u2019s that routed people to \u201crandom fields in Mexico\u201d<\/a>. Earlier today, Godier took his web app down and redirected his darkhours.io domain to Beher\u2019s darkhours.app.<\/p>\n At the end of my now-retracted post yesterday, assuming I had righteously and rightly skewered Apple for an egregiously erroneous App Store review rejection, I wrote:<\/p>\n Mistakes happen. But in a functioning system mistakes get
\nastronomy website for normal people. It was rejected on the
\ngrounds that it was astrology.<\/p>\n
\nanyone else I\u2019ve asked, would associate with astrology.<\/p>\n
\nastronomy app I am working on that began as an astrology app and
\nwas rejected after having the astrology content removed. App store [sic]
\nreview reached out to me and let me know that they had apparently
\nnever been given the updated build and that the app should be fine
\nto submit now.<\/p>\n
\ncorrected, and mistakes as obvious as this one get corrected
\nalmost instantly and include a quick apology for the conflation.<\/p>\n