David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

I don't care if you're threatening us.

This is not fair.

This is not reasonable.

Please approve.

And of course they didn't.

And it escalated.

And after a couple of days, we realized, you know what?

This isn't a mistake.

This isn't going away.

We're going to be dead if they go through with this.

If we're not going to yield and give them the 30%, they're going to kick us off.

Unless...

We make such a racket, such noise, that they will regret it.

And that's exactly what then happened.

We were blessed by the fact that we launched Hay one week before the WWDC, their Worldwide Developer Conference, where Apple loves to get up on stage and harp on how much they do for developers, how much they love them, and why you should bill for their new devices, and so on and so forth.

And then we also just happened to have a platform on the internet, which is very convenient when you need to go to war with a $3 trillion company.

So I started kicking and screaming and essentially turning it up to 11 in terms of the fight and going public with our denial to be in the app store.

And that turned into a prolonged two-week battle with Apple that essentially ended in the best possible outcome we could have gotten as David fighting Goliath, which was a bit of a truce.

We wouldn't hand 30% over to Apple.

They wouldn't kick us out of the App Store.