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As many of you may be seeing, many of Octal's premium features (logging in, posting replies, favoriting) are currently erroring. I've just been told by Hacker News folks that they're blocking these HTTP web requests (sign in, favorite, reply, etc) from the app due to excessive/unauthorized usage. It was frowned upon for Octal to be making these calls in the first place, as they aren't part of the public Firebase API.

As saddening as it is, I think there's not much I can do at this point. For now, I've removed the Premium in-app purchase from sale. My only course of action may be to update the app to make it a read-only experience. The problem is, I can't currently publish an app update, because Apple keeps rejecting them due to the app not offering a way for users to delete their HN account (which I obviously can't do). So I'm not sure how long it's going to take.

To be honest, this deprecation may be for the best, as I already didn't have enough time or dedication to properly maintain Octal before this happened. Octal was a pet project that just grew and grew over time, and while it was nice to make a little coffee money, it was definitely not worth the frustrations of working with undocumented HN APIs and dealing with Apple's App Store review process. The app is constantly rejected by Apple for silly reasons (opening HN links in-app, showing HN posts mentioning COVID, not offering account deletion, etc.). The original reason for building the app (fun) has been long gone.

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