Daring Fireball’s Dark Hours App Store retraction reverses a claim that Apple had wrongly barred an astronomy app. John Gruber said he withdrew the earlier post rather than revise it because its central premise was wrong: Apple had reviewed an app called Asterly, he wrote, while the astronomy-oriented web project later called Dark Hours had not been submitted to Apple.
The distinction is more than branding cleanup. The original post had described an iOS version of Dark Hours as an astronomy product rejected for being astrology, despite supposedly having no horoscopes, tarot, or other astrology features. Gruber’s August 8 retraction says that account conflated different versions of the project.
According to Gruber, the app Apple rejected in January was named Asterly and was devoted to astrology. He wrote that it included a “Tarot card of the day” feature. Apple’s App Review Board upheld the rejection in April, according to the retraction.
Why was the Dark Hours App Store story retracted?
Gruber said he had relied on Terry Godier’s public description of the rejection and on private messages from Godier. He apologized for publishing the claim and said responsibility for the post remained his, regardless of statements and omissions that he said had misled him.
The available account does not include Apple’s rejection notice or App Review Board records. Gruber’s conclusion that Apple’s decision was correct is therefore his reported correction, not an independently documented finding in the material available here.
Godier later changed the relevant section of his own post, according to Gruber’s retraction. The replacement note said the project had begun as an astrology app, that its astrology material had been removed, and that App Store review told him it apparently had not received the updated build. The note said the app should now be fine to submit.
That leaves a narrow but consequential unresolved point: Gruber said he did not know whether Godier had ever submitted an astronomy-only Asterly build to Apple, and had no reason to think one had been submitted. In other words, the record described in the retraction does not establish that Apple reviewed and rejected the later astronomy-focused version.
What happened to the original post?
Daring Fireball redirected the old article URL to the retraction. Gruber also left plain-text and PDF copies of the original available, each marked with a notice directing readers to the correction. He said this was the first full retraction in his 24 years writing the site.
The retraction also describes a separate dispute over the Dark Hours name and a similar web app run by developer Miguel Beher. Gruber wrote that Godier later took down his web version and redirected darkhours.io to Beher’s darkhours.app. The published account does not establish claims about ownership, copying, or infringement, so those claims should stay out of the headline-sized version of this mess.
This story draws on original reporting from Daring Fireball.
