iQuit

Despite emailing Apple since September, and repeatedly making it clear to them that my return is due on December 31st Apple still hasn’t sent me a report on the GST situation for sales of my applications on the Canadian iTunes store.  I’ve posted about this before, but I’ve been trying since September to get this information from them.  Every time I hear back from the same person, and she has repeatedly promised me they would be sent out “within the next month”, “the week after thanksgiving”, “early next week” each time moving it forward when I email asking why I haven’t got the report yet.

In the last email she said that they’re sending out the reports for 2008, how that helps anyone I don’t know, since you already would have had to file your 2008 GST return by now…  And she said that they would be sending out the reports for 2009 by the end of the year.  I’m guessing that must mean by the end of the year of 2010, since they’re just now sending out the 2008 reports.

So, what I had to do was go to my financial reports from iTunes Connect, figure out how much Apple would have charged Canadians for my app sales, and then figure out how much GST those charges would generate.  I used that number in my return.  I ignored the other complicated part of the situation (where Apple charges you GST for the commission they take on the app sales and you can claim that as GST paid out against what you owe).  Luckily (or unluckily actually) my sales are so crap in Canada these numbers are small and hopefully the CRA won’t kick me while I’m down since I don’t amount to much in their grand scheme of things.

What pisses me off the most about this whole situation is the complete lack of care or concern from the person I dealt with at Apple.  It was the same person every time.  It was like she was a robot.  My last email to her basically said “Hey, my return is dude on December 31st, and I need time to fill it out and mail it off.  If you can’t get the information to me through the automated system, can you at least give me the formulas you use or give me my numbers directly…” you know, basically pleading for her help.  Her response then was “We currently have 2008 GST invoices available; however,  2009 (Jan-Nov) should be ready by the end of the year.”  It’s like she’s a robot.  How could you send that to someone who just told you they have to file by December 31st (i.e. it has to be at CRA for December 31st, given Christmas mail traffic)?  That’s someone who just doesn’t give a shit at all.  Doesn’t care that you’re screwed, doesn’t affect her at all why bother to take time to solve someone’s problem.

Apple goes way too far with this with developers.  Apple’s the rich kid that has the cool new toy and never dies when you play cops and robbers, we’re the poor kid that will let him win every game and die every time even though we definitely shot first.

Well I delivered Milestone 2 on Friday and it went quite well.  I did have to work some overtime to get it done, but now the majority of the difficult work for the application is complete, and all that remains is implementing some of the other screens that will display different kinds of content.  These will go easy as they are mostly just more of the same work done so far.

I’ve got to devise some kind of scheme for remembering my place in the hierarchy of content so that when the user quits, then relaunches the app they come back to the same place.  I need some cool scheme for that.  Hmm..  Need to back of brain this one for a bit.

I’ve been mailing itstax@apple.com for months now trying to get GST numbers from them for my Canadian sales so I can file my GST return and they still haven’t sent them to me.  The last word from them was that they were finished testing their system to mail everyone and they would go out after Thanksgiving but I’m almost two weeks away from the deadline and still no report from them.  I guess I’ll have to hassle them again today with more seriousness.

I discovered this bit of code on a stackoverflow question:

- (BOOL) webView:(UIWebView*) webView
 shouldStartLoadWithRequest:(NSURLRequest*) request
 navigationType:(UIWebViewNavigationType) navigationType
{
   if ([request respondsToSelector:
                @selector(setValue:forHTTPHeaderField:)])
   {
      [request setValue:[NSString stringWithString:@"<whatever you want>"]
               forHTTPHeaderField:@"User_Agent"];
   }
   return true;
}

It worked when I tested it on various websites that display the user-agent of whatever browser you use to visit the link, but it didn’t work when I was visiting URLs on my client’s website.  There must be some server differences going on there I guess.  So I changed it to this:

- (BOOL) webView:(UIWebView*) webView
 shouldStartLoadWithRequest:(NSURLRequest*) request
 navigationType:(UIWebViewNavigationType) navigationType
{
   if (navigationType == UIWebViewNavigationTypeLinkClicked)
   {
      // These two lines would load the URL in mobile safari rather than
      // embedded in this app's UIWebView.  You might use this if you
      // had an app that displays offline HTML content, but you want to
      // redirect them to a website they can bookmark.
      [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:request.URL];
      return false;
   }
   if ([request respondsToSelector:
                @selector(setValue:forHTTPHeaderField:)])
   {
      [request setValue:[NSString stringWithString:@"<whatever you want>"]
               forHTTPHeaderField:@"User_Agent"];
      [request setValue:[NSString stringWithString:@"<whatever you want>"]
               forHTTPHeaderField:@"User-Agent"];
   }
   return true;
}

and now it works just great.  It’s a convenient method to allow your website to know it’s being visited by your app for whatever nefarious purpose you need.  Also you can see in the above code how you would go about loading links clicked in HTML loaded via a string from some offline content in mobile safari rather than inside the embedded UIWebView.