Phillip Shoemaker, who originally crafted the App Store’s guidelines together with the late Steve Jobs, says that those guidelines have been rewritten since his departure—and in a way he believes is intentionally vague. This, he says, has given Apple the ability to function as a sort of gatekeeper, a claim recently echoed by a Commerce Department report. But it has also allowed Apple to maintain an arbitrarily harsh stance against crypto and NFTs specifically, says Shoemaker.

“Apple had a problem with crypto from day one. They thought it was a Ponzi scheme,” he told Decrypt in an interview.