alt Hacker NewsThat’s also weird to me. I don’t have current 2025 info on the sanctions, but back in early 2022 I had a colleague with Russian citizenship who was living in Ireland (with proper permission to live and work - I think even permanent residence). He was exempted from the nationality-based sanctions because of his EU residence, although he did have to prove it to e.g. his banks.
Do the sanctions applicable in 2025 apply even to EU residents of Russian nationality or origin without such an exemption, or is this person covered by more narrow sanctions like one which name him individually, or is Apple going beyond the sanctions rules here for a store they don’t even operate?
Edit: reading the linked GitHub discussion more closely, it seems that he expects to benefit from the same exemption as I was describing, with the problem being twofold: one, the developer had neglected to update his personal info in Apple’s dev portal - not Apple’s fault, at least assuming that sanctions enforcement is their job at all in this scenario. But two, Apple has taken a long time to react to this guy providing proof of his Maltese residence, so that’s on them for being an unresponsive bottleneck.
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You're technically right, but entities find it easier to just ban everyone suspicious than to devote time and manpower to actually investigate.
And 3, Apple asking for a photo of the ID instead of using eID so the entire process can be tap > Face ID (in your country’s eID app) > done.
Also for some reason on App Store Connect, Apple is asking for a country of birth, not citizenship so with that alone, it’s unclear to me how can they make a determination at all.
Once again, our random spawn point (of which we have no control) is interfering with what we can and can’t do in life. Oh and Apple totally not getting how people live and move in the EU.
> But two, Apple has taken a long time to react to this guy providing proof of his Maltese residence, so that’s on them for being an unresponsive bottleneck.
Someone I know has Maltese citizenship. From the stories they've told, the unresponsive party might not be Apple.
(At one point, my friend had to show up at the Maltese immigration office in person to get them to respond to an inquiry.)