Silent Payments as the next step forward | SLP748

**Stephan Livera** (0:00)
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Rejoining me on the show today is Craig Raw, the founder, creator, developer of Sparrow Wallet. And, you know, Sparrow Wallet is an excellent wallet, basically my favorite desktop app for Bitcoin. And, yeah, Craig, welcome back to the show. I know there was some recent drama on your account for the Apple developer situation. So let's chat a little bit on that.
What's the latest there? As I understand, your account has been reinstated now, so you're not at risk of, you know, Sparrow not being available for Mac OS, right?

**Craig Raw** (0:35)
Yeah, thanks, Stephan. Really great to be back on the show. Yeah, so there has been a bit of drama this week, very unwanted drama, to be honest, I think, from all parties involved. But I received what I think was the result of like an automated process at Apple regarding an unpublished app that I put out, what I tried to put out a year ago. And I think some kind of automated process came along and said, well, this app is just a placeholder, which it was. And then said that they were going to terminate my Apple developer account, which means as a developer, that you can no longer publish applications for any Apple platform, including Mac OS in a way that allows them to be installed without bypassing a whole lot of security protections that Apple puts in place. So that was obviously very non-ideal, given what a wallet is, you definitely want to not be bypassing security safeguards in order to install any kind of application related to Bitcoin. It's just not a good thing to be doing. So that was obviously needed to be dealt with. Apple's review process is a little bit opaque. So in the end, I kind of had to take that off to social media because the deadline was drawing near and I didn't want it just to fall into this kind of void where people suddenly started to encounter these warnings when they tried to install the Sparrow and they're like, what is this? Is my wallet hacked? This kind of thing. So that has resulted in my account not being flagged for termination anymore. So that is now being successfully passed. And hopefully we will be in a situation in the future where that's not gonna happen again. However, the issue still remains that we have these scam apps which appear on the iOS app store. And there have been no small number of people who have very unfortunately been taken in by these scams and who have lost money to them.
So, you know, there is no Sparrow Wallet mobile app.
You know, that's just the way it is.
You know, there could be one, but then there would probably still be scam apps on the app store and people might still be getting scams. So there's no real easy solution to this other than Apple ensuring that there aren't any scam apps. That is just the only way to ensure that the app store is safe. Hopefully, with this latest incident, we are in a better place and hopefully Sparrow's more high profile to them now, and we have a lower chance of these scam apps in future. That remains to be seen.

**Stephan Livera** (3:33)
What lessons can we take if you're, let's say a listener is an app developer, a Bitcoin app developer. Is there anything they should think about here?

**Craig Raw** (3:45)
Yeah, I think, look, you have to realize if you are developing four Apple platforms, that everything you write is effectively within their walled garden. And the thing about a walled garden is that it is their right to take away your access to that walled garden. You can hate that, you can love it, you can decide not to develop for them, whatever you want to do. But I think you have to realize that fact. That is a very fundamental fact.
And that's not true of Linux. So some people will say, well, therefore, you should just only develop for Linux. I personally don't hold that view. I think you have to, my general view around application development is that you only really create meaningful change if you target as many people as you can. You have to try and be inclusive. You can't just say, well, I don't like this and I don't like that. So I'm going to narrow my focus down to only the stuff that fits my particular point of view. Now, of course, I don't like the fact that Apple can simply take away my ability to write Sparrow Wallet for a huge number of people.