I emailed Tim Cook

My startup worked day and (sometimes) night for several weeks to make a killer ad blocker for iOS 9 called Adblock Fast. But you can’t get the app.

We submitted Adblock Fast within hours of Apple opening the App Store up to iOS 9 apps two Fridays ago. And … we waited and waited and waited to be reviewed, while other ad blockers were approved and climbed to the top of the app charts.

Steve Jobs was known to reply to the occasional unsolicited email. So I emailed Tim Cook.

   From: Brian Kennish <[email protected]>
     To: Tim Cook <[email protected]>
   Date: Fri, 18 Sep 2015 23:01:07 -0700
Subject: I can’t imagine you’re aware how this part of your company
         operates

Dear Tim, you seem like quite a reasonable fellow. So I can’t imagine you’re aware how this part of your company operates.

Your default assumption must be that I’m a crazy person from the Internet. Actually, I’ve created twenty apps as an independent developer that’ve been installed a combined ten million times. I was a Google engineer for seven years. And I wrote the first mobile ad server, for DoubleClick (okay, perhaps this “accomplishment” does make me a crazy person from the Internet).

My current company put hundreds of man-hours into designing and developing a great ad-blocking app for iOS 9. We submitted mere hours after Apple began accepting iOS 9 apps last Friday evening. Many ad blockers have since been approved and have spent the past three days atop the app charts. Others, including ours, haven’t even been reviewed.

The articles have been written, the tweets tweeted, and the zeitgeist affixed upon the next shiny thing. The winners in this category were chosen, arbitrarily, based on which apps your team reviewed and the losers based on which they did not. We’re among the losers.

Apple, more than any dominant company in history, knows that that dominance can disappear in a hurry. Developers, I’m certain you agree, account for much of the company’s present-day advantage. Once you lose the developers, like Twitter has, you lose them forever. Sure, you’re safe now. There’s nowhere else for us to go. But, soon, soon there will be. There always is.

Let’s see if he replies. At worst, we keep waiting. Apple has got us used to waiting.

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I’ve been thinking about (un)fairness around platform access and distribution for a long time. If you’re interested in hearing more about this problem – maybe a solution too – please follow me here and/or on Twitter.