That's true but there is already at least one case of Apple saying yes, so this doesn't seem to be a fake initiative to deflect criticism while not changing anything: https://twitter.com/chronic/status/1299777657744142336

I believe there are two ways of friction/problem:

- such created by accident weather it's because of suboptimal rules, vague formulation or reviewers give mad with power

- such created intentionally to control the platform in all reasonable and unreasonable ways

I believe Apple does try to fix or lesson the burden of the first for the benefit of everyone including them.

But they won't do so for the second reason where you most likely still get a no even if they are acting unreasonable.

At the same time they now can point to this and say "see we are all fair" even if they are not.

Agreed, Apple isn't going to say "Well since you asked nicely, I guess you can implement your own in-app purchase processing." But having an official recourse on their arbitrary app store bans from minor rule interpretations is still a great improvement. Probably driven by the antitrust attention they're getting, since otherwise they've been able to get away with whatever they want and small developers can't do anything about it.

The remaining big question is whether Apple will rule in someone's favor on their own, or if in practice the result is still "Things will get fixed if and only if they get enough attention on twitter."

"so this doesn't seem to be a fake initiative to deflect criticism". It is along the lines of "what is the smallest change we can make that will satisfy the monopoly challenges". It may even be in good faith, but it is very low risk for them as they are still ultimately the decider of what changes they will make and the entire onus is on the developer to argue the case that a certain guideline should be changed. If developer feedback on guidelines is so important to them why they don't open new guidelines to developer feedback before implementing them?

The supreme court of Apple's review process will still be the press and bad publicity, I see.

That only works for big players like Epic. As a single developer doesn't get this kind of attention.

Oh yes, I totally agree and this is one of the reasons I think that Apple has abused their iOS AppStore monopoly. Only players with similar clout have the ability to fight back.