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This story is wild. Where to start?

John Gruber posts “App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours” (now retracted) about Terry Godier’s “Browsers have standards, the App Store has judgment” (since edited).

Godier claimed to have built an astronomy app called Dark Hours over four months, and that Apple rejected the app “on the grounds that it was Astrology”. Gruber ran with the story, heavily criticising Apple.

The next day Gruber retracted his post. The app rejected by Apple was called Asterly, not Dark Hours, and did in fact contain astrology, as Godier later admits. Gruber even gave Godier a draft before publishing his original post and Godier “offered not a word of caution”.

The story doesn’t end there!

The developer of an app called DarkHours called out Godier on Bluesky citing similar features and bugs. Godier quickly posts Mea Culpa - Dark Hours blaming AI and Claude for the rip off. Godier redirected his domain to the original app.

The original DarkHours also appears to be heavily vibe-coded. It’s MIT licensed too, so a simple attribution would have been sufficient. Comments on Mastodon suggest “It’s slop all the way down.”

Whatever the truth, these are dark hours for open source, that’s for sure.