- Former Apple store head says the tech giant had problems with crypto from the start.
- According to the ex-Apple employee, the firm considered crypto a scam.
- He blames current App store head Phil Schiller for vague app store guidelines.
One of Apple’s former app store heads, Phillip Shoemaker, claims that the cumbersome procedure for cryptocurrency-based businesses to get listed on the app store has been deliberately made difficult. Shoemaker claims that the App Store’s criteria have been modified after he left, and in a way he feels is intentionally unclear. He and the late Steve Jobs were responsible for the initial version of the guidelines.
As a result, Apple has become something of a gatekeeper, but, as Shoemaker points out, it has also been able to maintain an excessively punitive stance against cryptocurrencies in general and NFTs in particular.
“Apple had a problem with crypto from day one. They thought it was a Ponzi scheme,” Shoemaker said in an interview.
Currently working as the CEO of Identity.com, Shoemaker claims he tried to simplify the App Store guidelines as much as possible when he was there. According to him, the goal during his time at Apple was “to make them more black and white over time to make developers understand what they can and can’t do.”
Following Shoemaker’s departure in 2016, Apple’s legal team and veteran Apple Fellow Phil Schiller, who currently heads the App Store, updated the guidelines. Shoemaker blames Schiller for Apple’s allegedly hostile stance toward cryptocurrency. According to Shoemaker, the 2016 update purposefully muddied the rules.
“They ended up making things even more vague and more gray than before. We need black and white, we don’t need gray,” he said.
Meanwhile, malicious apps remain a persistent problem in Apple’s app store. Sophos senior threat researcher Jagadeesh Chandraiah recently released a paper detailing how two malicious apps, Ace Pro and MBM BitScan, were able to bypass the regulations of both Apple’s and Google’s app stores.
These apps were created for use in a crypto romance scam. This is an elaborate financial fraud that targets people who use dating apps by using emotional lures to hook them and then trick them into making fake cryptocurrency investments.
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