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Getting an app listed on the Apple App Store is no easy task, but it has been a particularly arduous process for crypto companies and projects.

It’s no accident, according to Apple’s former App Store director.

Phillip Shoemaker, who originally created the App Store guidelines with the late Steve Jobs, says those guidelines have been rewritten since his departure — and in a way he believes are intentionally vague. This, he says, has given Apple the ability to act as a sort of gatekeeper, a claim recently echoed by one Report from the Ministry of Commerce. But it has also allowed Apple to maintain an arbitrarily tough stance against crypto and NFTs specifically, says Shoemaker.

“Apple had a problem with crypto from day one. They thought it was a Ponzi scheme,” he said Decrypt in an interview.

App Store Origins

Shoemaker, who worked at Apple for over seven years from 2009 to 2016 and is now CEO of Identity.com, says his initial goal was to make App Store policies as simple as possible. “The goal was always to make them more black and white over time to get developers to understand what they can and can’t do,” he said.

After all, getting accepted into the Apple or Google app stores can make or break a company. And a rejection can cause serious setbacks for app developers.

“I had hundreds of death threats,” Shoemaker said of his interactions with frustrated developers. “I had people following me out to my car, people sneaking into Apple.”

In a 2019 Bloomberg interview, Shoemaker said his app endorsement could even hurt Apple’s stock price. “Jobs used to say I had the worst job at Apple because no matter what I did, somebody hated me,” Shoemaker said Decrypt.

After Shoemaker’s departure in 2016, Apple’s App Store guidelines were rewritten by Apple’s legal team and longtime Apple Fellow Phil Schiller, who now oversees the App Store. Shoemaker points the finger at Schiller for what he considers to be Apple’s adversarial relationship with crypto.

“They went through a big change, I would say, right when I left,” Shoemaker said. “The tone changed significantly.”

Shoemaker claims the 2016 rewrite made the guidelines intentionally unclear. “They ended up making things even more vague and grayer than before. We need black and white, we don’t need grey, he said.

Schiller did not answer Decryptits request for comment. And when asked about its official stance on crypto, only an Apple representative just replied with a link to the cryptocurrency section of his App Store Assessment Guidelineswhich describes in five bullet points what crypto app developers can and cannot do on the platform.

Crypto Conundrum

The Apple App Store has cracked down on various crypto apps that they believe violate the guidelines over the years. Ten years agowhile Shoemaker was still with the company, Coinbase’s app was banned from Apple’s App Store for an entire year.

Coinbase did not respond Decryptits request for comment, and when Decrypt contacted Apple to ask why the Coinbase app was banned in 2013, a representative referred us back App Store Developer Guidelines.

In 2020, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote that Apple has been “very restrictive and hostile to cryptocurrency over the years.” He explained that some features of the Coinbase app had been blocked but later removed chirping.

In 2022, Apple updated its App Store review Guidelines to address NFTs– unique blockchain tokens that can signify ownership of associated metadata such as art, meta worst countryor a membership card to an exclusive club.

“Apps may use in-app purchases to sell and sell services related to non-fungible tokens (NFTs), such as minting, listing and transfer,” new guidelines read. “Apps may allow users to view their own NFTs, provided that NFT ownership does not unlock features or functionality within the app.”

This means that purchasing NFTs through an app will incur Apple’s hefty 30% fee, and any NFTs viewable through an app that were not purchased in-app are not allowed to unlock additional content or features in the app. Developers are also not allowed to offer users any in-app solutions to avoid the 30% fee, such as visiting an external link in a browser.

In December 2022, Coinbase found itself in trouble again when Apple began enforcing its new NFT rules and blocked the Coinbase Wallet app to the removed NFT transfer function. Coinbase said their app was banned because Apple wanted to put a 30% tax on someone Ethereum gas feeswhich Coinbase said was technically impossible.

“To anyone who understands how NFTs and blockchains work, this is clearly not possible,” Coinbase so. “Apple’s proprietary In-App Purchase system doesn’t support crypto, so we couldn’t comply even if we tried.”

Shoemaker believes that these new NFT rules were created with the same “tough” tone as the rest of Apple’s payment rules.

“It’s the bully who wants your lunch money,” Shoemaker said of Apple’s 30% in-app purchase fee. “That’s just the bottom line.”