Why Getting Banned by Apple was a Great Thing

I'll never forget the phone call - it was a Friday night and I ran across the street from my rental apartment to get a quick bite to eat. I hadn't eaten the whole day and was mega stressed out because we couldn't spin up enough Amazon EC2 instances to handle the explosion of traffic from new users signing up.

"Hello, is this Sang Shin?" Yes, who is this? "This is _________ from Apple - I'm calling to tell you that we will be removing your app from the App Store tomorrow." And just like that, I was thrust into a 3-month saga that concluded with Apple banning me on Jan. 2016.

David vs. Goliath

When I reflect on that period of my life, what stands out the most is how our tiny startup of just six people made the largest company in the world blink. Somehow, an ant caused a herd of elephants to pause and think about changing course. Such is the magic of disruption in the digital era.

But what were we doing? What was our startup about?

It was about your data. My data. Our data.

You see, back in 2013, it dawned upon us that all these large companies like Google and Facebook collecting our data in exchange for some "freebies" like a search engine or a social network really didn't make sense. They made billions selling our data to advertisers, and basically hid that in text so small Ant Man wouldn't be able to read it. While the phrase "you are the product" is common knowledge today, not many knew of it a decade ago.

So we decided to do something about it.

My co-founder and I quit our careers in the investment management world, moved out of Manhattan and went to Palo Alto in California to pursue Been, Inc.

Our goal? To develop a way to empower people to take back control and the value of their data. Whether or not to share it. Whether or not to get paid for it. Whether or not to get sent ads from it.

Fast forwarding through all the trials, tribulations, pivots, and other startup stories, we ended up in the end with our mobile app: Been Choice. Its purpose? To give people a Choice on whether or not to share, profit, or keep all the data about where you've Been and what you've Been doing.

Our app was simple: install it and you were magically taken off-grid. No website or app would be able to monitor you to collect your data to send you ads. All we had was a simple switch: if you decided to opt-in and engage it, you would get paid for your data, and for the privilege of advertisers to send you ads based on the data you shared. It was up to you - your Choice.

The advertisers, instead of paying the big bucks to the likes of Facebook and Google would instead pay you directly for advertising since you would be knowingly sharing your high quality, first-party data with them - this was an explicit and transparent transaction based on your data without any shady background data collection and stitching together fuzziness. You would get to see ads that you actually wanted to see, and not only that, you would get paid to see them. And we would charge the advertisers a commission for our revenue.

Or, you could just leave the switch on "Block" - its default state - and just stay off the grid.

Sleeping with the Devil

I'm not going to get into the technical details of how this all worked, but basically, in order to do the deep packet inspection at the core of our app, we needed to gain access to Apple's protected iOS kernel network utilities. In techingese, we basically provided a sophisticated way to MITM yourself. There are two ways to do that: jailbreak or get special permission from Apple.

Jailbreaking was obviously not an option so we went to get permission - it required going through a whole process of applying for access and justifying the need behind it. Apple awards access to special cases, usually to government and academic institutions. We were very clear about why we needed access: to give people the right to own their data.

We were awarded with access to the protected kernel calls. I was thrilled - Apple really practices what it preaches! It really cares about its users and their right to own their data!

The Beginning of the End

I believe it was like 4pm when I got the frantic call from my co-founder. I was passed out from pulling a couple of all-nighters in a row. "Hey Sang, wake up man - we are on the front of Financial Times!" What? I loaded the website, and there we were, next to headlines about the EU rejecting data sharing w/Facebook/Google and VW's scandal.

Holy shit!

I check our app - dead. I load our AWS console - all servers maxed out, and auto scaling basically not scaling fast enough (AWS five years ago was stone age tech compared to what we have today). Thus began a period of time where I was consumed by frantic attempts to match the tens of thousands of downloads happening every hour. This was my first experience of being at the nexus of a viral cyclone storm - you simply can't react fast enough.

We grew so quickly and spawned so many news articles, blog posts and tweets (googling "beenchoice" will give you a glimpse) that all of sudden, we appeared on the radars of Goliath... or should I say, Goliaths. They didn't like what we were doing - duh.

But Apple had our back right?

Money talks, BS walks

So, circle back to the beginning of this article - Friday night, hopped across the street to get a quick bite to eat, and bam: that phone call from Apple.

Ultimately, Apple found itself in a pickle. It enabled us to build Been Choice - and it even updated Safari so that developers could essentially do something similar for websites. Yet apps, not websites was where all the advertising money was being made - something that Google missed out to Facebook on mobile phones.

After three months of deliberating, back and forth and back and forth, Apple finally made the call to pull the plug on our app permanently, citing some technicality about certs which had been in place since, well, forever. They changed that (we forced an update to iOS) and that change wiped out thousands of other apps as well.

As the final touch, they banned me - not the app, me. My Apple developer account was killed, and they told me any attempts to create new ones would be squashed. Apparently, I was a threat to "interfere" with their business.

I can literally say that I was a disruptor. And that's why I was banned.

A Happy Ending

So how on earth is that a great thing? I'll tell you how: it helped put the importance of people being aware of and being in charge of owning their data in the spotlight.

Apple taking its action against us really ratcheted up the virality of what we were doing. We got calls from law firms willing to help us sue Apple. We got people from all over the world - places as far as the Middle East asking us about how they could build something similar.

Ultimately, before Netflix's "The Social Dilemma," and before Cambridge Analytica, there was us. We were part of the building blocks that led to where we are today, where public awareness has risen, and where change is coming.

And that is why getting banned by Apple was a great thing.

Epilogue

When we embarked on our journey, we did research and were astonished to find out that our idea was not new. In fact, all the way back in the 1990s, there were people already fighting the good fight - using Netscape (remember that?) and 3rd party cookies. We saw a path filled with skeletons from our predecessors who had valiantly tried, and failed. My co-founder and I had to look each other squarely in the eye and decide whether or not to go down this path littered with dead bodies.

The consequence of not trying was too great - even with the odds going against us. We knew, and I still fully believe in this, that someone, some startup, some company, some entity will eventually succeed. Not trying was too large an opportunity cost.

When I look back on my life on my death bed, exercising Jeff Bezos' Regret Minimization Framework, I will evince a smile as I nod my head one last time affirming that I wouldn't have done it any other way before I peace out.