Apple Explains Why It Rejects Bitcoin Apps

This post Apple Explains Why It Rejects Bitcoin Apps originally appeared on Truth About Bills

Over the past couple of months, there have been a few Bitcoin app rejections by Apple that have made some waves. First, the venture-backed startup Coinbase had its app removed entirely from the App Store. Today, a blog post from peer-to-peer messaging and payments app Gliph highlights its own rejection and the subsequent removal of its ability to transact in Bitcoin.

Gliph’s Rob Banagale talks about a few aspects of the rejection, including the technical details of how Gliph handles Bitcoin, Apple’s motivations for rejecting the app and the possibility that it could change its mind.

The rejection, Banagale notes, was based largely off of section 22.1 of Apple’s App Store review guidelines. The rule states that “apps must comply with all legal requirements in any location where they are made available to users. It is the developer’s obligation to understand and conform to all local laws.”

Bitcoin is not illegal, but it is also not legally recognized by governments as a currency. This gray area is what is leading Apple to reject Bitcoin-transaction apps.

We reached out to Banagale to talk about the way that Gliph functions, and how it differs from apps like Coinbase. He notes that the app works with wallets like those from Coinbase and BIPS, but doesn’t function as a wallet itself. Instead, it passes along requests for wallet addresses (just strings of numbers) to the wallets themselves, and back to the recipient. The setup also means that Gliph does not deal with exchanges.

“We didn’t want to specify which wallet you had to use,” Banagale says. “By doing it that way we aren’t really manipulating Bitcoin directly.”

This method means that Gliph isn’t actually processing Bitcoin transactions, just facilitating them. It’s a distinction that may either be lost on Apple, or that isn’t evident enough to differentiate Gliph from other Bitcoin wallet apps.

Banagale notes that Apple itself may be planning on entering the payments game outside of its own stores, and that this may have influenced their decision to reject Bitcoin apps. But that’s probably pretty unlikely. It is clear, though, that Apple isn’t acting as any real advocateof Bitcoin at this point, something that Banagale says it’s in a good position to do.

In the end, the answer is likely fairly simple. From our understanding, Apple rejected both Coinbase and Gliph based on rule 22.1 specifically. Yes, the interpretation of the rule is fairly narrow, as Bitcoin has not been declared legal or illegal in most of the areas that the apps have been available. But this is not a matter of speculation about whether Bitcoin willbecome legal, it’s a simple matter of whether or not it is currently legal. Since there is no clear-cut government acknowledgement of Bitcoin’s legality, Apple is simply taking the safest, most protective path by disallowing transaction functionality in App Store apps — for now.

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This post Apple Explains Why It Rejects Bitcoin Apps originally appeared on Truth About Bills