John Gruber Retracts Daring Fireball Post on Apple's App Store Rejection

Daring Fireball's John Gruber has retracted an article published a day earlier that accused Apple's App Store review of wrongly rejecting an astronomy app. In a post dated Saturday, 8 August 2026, Gruber wrote that the premise of his piece, "App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours", was so fundamentally wrong that merely correcting or editing it would serve no purpose.

What actually happened

The app was submitted to the App Store under the name "Asterly" by developer Terry Godier, who described it publicly as an astronomy app with no tarot function and no horoscopes. Gruber took that account at face value — after both the public post and a private message exchange — and wrote that Apple had rejected an app called "Dark Hours", a name the review team had never seen.

Godier's post has since changed. It now says that App Review apparently never received the updated build and that the app should be fine to submit. According to Gruber, the app as originally submitted was dedicated to astrology and included a "Tarot card of the day" feature, and the App Review Board's April decision to uphold the rejection was correct.

A name clash and a takedown

After the original story reached Hacker News, it drew the attention of Miguel Beher, author of an open-source astrophotography and dark-sky planning project that is also called DarkHours. In an exchange on Bluesky, Beher noted that Godier's web app at darkhours.io reproduced a bug from his own project that routed users to "random fields in Mexico". Godier has since taken his web app down and redirected the darkhours.io domain to Beher's darkhours.app.

Correction and context

Gruber said the retraction is the first in the 24 years he has been writing Daring Fireball, and apologised to readers and to the App Store reviewers he had criticised. The original text remains available as plain text and PDF, each with a preface linking to the retraction, and its URL now redirects to the correction.

Apple's App Store Review Guidelines note in rule 4.3(b) that fortune-telling apps are a well-established category the company will not expand unless a submission offers a meaningfully different experience, although astrology apps remain widely available on the store.