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How Apple's App Review Is Sabotaging the iPhone
snydeq writes to recommend Peter Wayner's inside look at the frustration iPhone developers face from Apple when attempting to distribute their apps through the iPhone App Store. Wayner's long piece is an extended analogy comparing Apple to the worst of Soviet-era bureaucracy. "Determined simply to dump an HTML version of his book into UIWebView and offer two versions through the App Store, Wayner endures four months of inexplicable silences, mixed messages, and almost whimsical rejections from Apple — the kind of frustration and uncertainty Wayner believes is fast transforming Apple's regulated marketplace into a hotbed of bottom-feeding mediocrity. 'Developers are afraid to risk serious development time on the platform as long as anonymous gatekeepers are able to delay projects by weeks and months with some seemingly random flick of a finger,' Wayner writes of his experience. 'It's one thing to delay a homebrew project like mine, but it's another thing to shut down a team of developers burning real cash. Apple should be worried when real programmers shrug off the rejections by saying, "It's just a hobby."'"
Do you have any idea of what it was like to develop mobile apps before Cocoa Touch was available?
Do you? A fanboi of your magnitude wouldn't have touch a non-apple toolchain. Ergo, you have no idea what the competition is doing.
If you read deeper, you'll find the answers to some of your questions. First, the AppStore has proven to be worthless for driving any interest in my books. You can't even find the book by typing the name of the book into the search field. It doesn't help to add quotes around the name. You get other apps with odd names. Don't ask me what's going on.
But I'm willing to bet that when you made the app, your hope was that it would drive some kind of interest in your books. Why not make one for the Blackberry?
Qxe4
From the sound of it he's tried getting the app passed numerous times despite knowing that what he's doing is not allowed. It got through one time, when he was using subterfuge to trick the review team. The guy is a stubborn ass. All he needs to do is follow the guidelines for apps.
We've got 5 apps published. Two point revisions have been rejected, quite rightly, because the reviewers caught bugs. We fixed the bugs and they get accepted.
He's clearly the architect of his own downfall.
The rejections weren't nonsensical, you just didn't agree with them. Apple's guidelines are freely available and fairly clear (even if they appear to give a a fair amount wiggle room). The fact that you attempted to re-submit a reworked version of your app, all while knowing that it still failed to comply with Apple's rules, is particularly telling. Don't like the fact that you're not supposed to link to 3rd party libraries? Do you think it's silly that they don't want the app's charity focus announced in the store? Well, too bad. There are plenty of other mobile platforms with far less traction that would love to have your half-assed product. This isn't Open Source, and you don't get to just take other people's hard work, make some little throwaway project, refuse to play by the rules, and then throw a hissy fit when things don't go your way.