I give up. It‘s impossible to argue with Apple.

I tried to bring my unofficial iOS devRant app "JoyRant" into the AppStore. It was available via TestFlight for years and it wasn‘t a problem there, apparently. Now for the AppStore, it is a problem.

I talked with the Apple review team for 3 weeks and the discussion went in circles.
They said that my app tries to disguise as or to misrepresent another app on the store (the official devRant app, even though it‘s not available anymore, apparently).

I was asked to remove all of the mentions of devRant from any description or any place in the app. I did. Even though it was stupid because how are people supposed to know that they need a devRant account to use my app? I‘m not allowed to mention devRant.

After that, they said that it can not have the name JoyRant because it sounds too similar to devRant.
I changed it to devJoy everywhere, the app, the meta data for the app store, the github page where the required legal crap is hosted, and in the legal documents themselves.
Did it help? No, it didn‘t.

Apple then proceeded to claim that my app is trying to deceive the users into thinking that this is the official devRant app. Even though I have explicitly stated in the description that it is just an unofficial devRant client.

Now apple says that I should "revise the app content".
Which I assume means that I need to make it something different. Yeah. Great suggestion!

So, I will rename the app back to JoyRant and provide it via TestFlight, as it was before.

Thanks for reading. I needed to vent.

Are devrant servers dying? Algo sorting doesn’t load more rants and recents sorting is kinda wonky.

I tried official devrant app on ios and joyrant with same results.

This is kind of a test if I can still rant or not.

I’m currently working on the profile view in JoyRant, which turns out to be much more work than I thought.

Anyway, after many iterations on the appearance, I’m now finally satisfied about how it looks and works. Especially the category picker (Rants, ++’s, Comments, Favorites).

What do you think? Do you like it?

It’s so sad that this “Auth for Google authenticator” app whose logo definitely doesn’t try to impersonate google with a similar color scheme, with in-app purchases, is allowed to exist, while Lensflare’s JoyRant isn’t.

I‘m thinking about running my own spam downvoting bots based on the so far very successful spam detection in JoyRant.

*successful in terms of detection accuracy.

@retoor how frequently do you need to create new bots?
How quicky do they lose downvote privileges?
Other useful things to know?

Also, I haven’t seen you recently, since you deleted your account. How are you doing?

Finally added UI to pick a reason for downvoting in JoyRant :)

JoyRant build 12:

* Copy Rant Link
* Customize Accent Color

That’s right! You can pick your favorite color as the accent color of JoyRant in the settings.

The new ColorPicker in SwiftUI is really great!

Is the search function useless?
I tried it in the official devRant app because I consider adding it to JoyRant.
But it never finds anything relevant for me.
Even if I give it an exact substring of a comment, it doesn’t find it.
It also doesn’t find users (which would be useful)

Does it only work for the text in a rant?

Do you find it useful?

Just had an idea for a feature in JoyRant.

Collect all usernames encountered in rants and comments and store them.

Make a button to present a list of all of the users so that a @mention can be added in the text.

Sometimes I forget the exact names of users and I think this would help finding them.

What do you think?

Yo @Lensflare, JoyRant beta expired again. It says I should update my iOS to 17 to continue testing, but my phone only supports 16. What should I do?

Lensflare, look at how those lines in between menu elements don’t protrude all the way to the left edge, instead stopping before icons, so there is no line in between icons. Telegram uses the same UI pattern for “all chats” screen, and it looks good. What about using it in JoyRant in notifications screen?

Thanks for your feedback for JoyRant, kiki!

I read it just now because I’m too lazy to read my private emails regularly 😅

The "in the settings" grammar will be fixed in the next version.

Image placeholder is squashed to 1:1 ratio, yes. I see it as a non issue though 😅.
It wouldn’t be too much work to fix it but… meh.

I don’t know why the images stay placeholders though. Never happened to me.
In your screenshot I see that you have Flight mode on, maybe that’s the reason?
You can also try to clear the image cache in (the) settings.

JoyRant beta has expired! Need new TestFlight link