Hi everyone,
I want to share what the last year has been like, partly to be heard, and partly because I think other solo developers should know this can happen.
Two years ago, I was driving Uber in New Zealand. Somewhere during those long shifts, talking to passengers and thinking about the same idea every single day, I decided to build my own ride-hailing platform. I had no background in coding. None. I just started.
I hosted my own server. I learned to build a backend. Then a frontend. Then a whole driver app and a whole rider app. My daily routine was this: I'd drive with my MacBook sitting on the dash of my Prius. When rides were quiet, I'd pull over to the side of the road and code. I drove close to 70,000 km around New Zealand while building these apps. I gave up a large part of my time with my family, and there are moments with my baby girl that I won't get back. My family supported me the whole way, and they were proud of me.
After nine months, I had four apps built. The Android versions went live and have been running with no issues, no complaints, and no flags. Then I built the iOS versions too, got them through TestFlight and into production. The first time they were live, I felt something I'd never felt before—that I'd actually made something. I showed them to friends, family, and even my Uber passengers. That feeling of accomplishment was everything.
I had two apps:
A driver app for drivers. A rider app that riders use to hail taxis.
We had live tracking and every feature that Uber had. The only thing I assume I did wrong (since I was inexperienced) was that I gave login credentials to the Apple review team so they could access my driver app.
So far, so good.
I wanted them to experience the full flow of the app, so I decided to dispatch demo (dummy) offers so they could see the complete journey. A new offer would appear whenever they tapped Go Online, repeating every two or three minutes. My intention was for them to see the incoming offer and go through the different stages of the app—receiving an offer, accepting it, driving to the destination, ending the trip, seeing the reward card, fare, and so on. They would never have seen all of this if I hadn't created a dummy offer.
This mechanism was activated only for the Apple reviewer credentials. No one else would ever experience it.
I think they assumed I was giving fake offers or misrepresenting the app. A human reviewer, understanding the intent, would hopefully have recognised what I was trying to demonstrate. At the very least, I wish they had flagged it and given me a chance to explain instead of terminating my account overnight.
Based on this, I recreated the exact timeline from my backend logs.
Here's exactly what happened:
Time (NZ)
15:03:47 — Logged in — ✅ 200
15:03–15:04 — Browsed earnings, job history, past trip #1164, payouts, and Stripe status — ✅ All fine
15:04:23 — Tapped Go Online — ✅
15:04:23 — Backend seeded a fake ride offer (#1038) — Offer appears
15:04:27 — Rejected the offer (after 4 seconds) — ✅
15:06:00 — Last seen timestamp — Last successful moment
15:06:10 — A second Apple login (17.185.64.86) accessed the same account — First session disconnected
15:06:12–15:07:47 — Reviewer's live connection failed 7 times ("session_token mismatch" → 403) — ❌ Broken
15:06:13 — Tried to go offline — ❌ 401
15:06–15:12 — Received a new fake offer approximately every 2 minutes; attempted to reject them but received 400 errors — ❌
~15:13 — Reviewer left — Nothing completed
Then one day, I got a notice from Apple. My Developer Program membership was terminated under Section 3.2(f). All my apps were pulled from the App Store overnight.
Here's the part I want other solo founders to understand, because it's the part that still keeps me up:
There was no warning. No email first. No "this looks wrong, can you explain or fix it?" Just termination, and everything was gone in one moment.
I filed an appeal through the official channel. It came back as a final denial, and they said there would be no further appeals on the account. From my own server logs, I could see that between the termination and the denial, no reviewer ever opened the app again. The decision was made from their records, not from a fresh look. So there was genuinely nothing I could have shown them—no fix, no explanation—that would have been seen.
I'm not writing this to argue that Apple has no right to protect its platform. It does. But for a one-person team, a Section 3.2(f) termination means your entire business can disappear overnight, with no warning and no practical way back. I don't think many solo developers realise how final and how fast that is until it happens to them.
So I wanted to ask the community a few honest questions:
Has anyone here been through a Section 3.2(f) account termination? What happened next? Is there genuinely any path forward once an appeal is marked final—a separate entity, a legal channel, or anything else? And a broader question: do you think there should be a warning, or a short window to fix things, before a lifetime ban, especially for solo developers whose whole livelihood is on the line?
This has been one of the hardest stretches of my life. I put everything into this. If even a few people read it and it saves them from the same fall, or if someone genuinely knows a path forward, that would mean a lot.
Thank you for reading.
