Slashdot Mirror
How To Get Rejected From the App Store
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister catalogs 12 sure-fire ways to get your app rejected from Apple's notoriously fickle App Store. From executing interpreted code, to using Apple's APIs without permission, to designing your UI, each transgression has been abstracted from real-life rejections — for the most part because Apple seems to be making up the rules as it goes along. 'It'd be nice for Apple to make conditions for rejection clear,' McAllister writes. 'Apple has been tinkering with the language of its iPhone SDK license agreement lately, but that hasn't done much to clarify the rules — unless you're Adobe. For everyone else, the App Store's requirements seem as vague and capricious as ever.'"
No, it's nothing like Calvinball.
In Calvinball, both players got to change the rules. With the iphone, only Apple gets to.
The issue there was that Microsoft app writers (like Microsoft Office) were able to use private APIs and nobody else was.
Except that according to people like Raymond Chen, the Office folks were just crappily reverse engineering those private APIs and doing things they weren't supposed to be doing by having done so.
From a a comment in this article posted by him:
The functions were exported only by ordinal. There was no documentation, there was no LIB file to link against, the function wasn't named; you had to reverse-engineer the LIB file and link with it. Surely that must've been a clue that what you were doing was the slightest bit dodgy. Office probably found those undocumented functions the same way you did. In the Windows division, we treat Microsoft applications the same as any other company's applications. In fact, earlier versions of the programs now known collectively as Office were such problems that -- I hope the Office folks' feelings aren't hurt by this -- we made up insulting names for them just to keep our sanity. The only one that comes to mind right now is "PowerPig". (I must point out that in the intervening years, the Office folks have done a fabulous job of getting their act together.)
I have no problem with "just cause" if there are avenues for communication and appeal. However...
My app was kicked out of the App Store after 12 months. It was the best app for cricket scores out there - #1 app in almost all cricket-playing countries, great online and offline reviews, featured by Apple several times etc. All of the scores etc for it were obtained from legal sources. However, the developers for the official app of the Indian Premier League (sort-of international cricket competition in March/April every year) complained to Apple that my app infringed on their exclusive rights to provide information on IPL matches and, after a bit of back-and-forth arguments between myself and them, Apple pulled the app.
Now, it's not the fact that they pulled it without "just cause" that upset me, but that they refused to comment and communicate about it in any way. I repeatedly sent emails to various official (and unofficial) contacts at Apple to seek clarification, complain and get the app re-instated, but not a peep from anyone. I even sent an official DMCA Counter Notification and not a single response on that either.
After no word from anyone for a long while, I had to close the service even for existing users who already had the app on their iPhones 'cos I couldn't afford to keep paying for the match data feeds with no revenues. Apple's decision has cost me thousands of dollars, but again, what really upsets me is the total lack of professionalism and common courtesy that they have displayed in this.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
The number one problem with Apple marketing is that some people accidentally believe it.
It's interesting that the sages of ancient wisdom understood Apple long before it was created. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
To advantage which of it own Apps does Apple use its OS advantage ?
On the iPad, only Apple software can multitask (this article has a list: email client, SMS text client, and other apps). On any of their platforms, only Apple software may use the APIs that let you customize the way the UI widgets display. Only Apple software can use the full functionality of the accelerometer. Here is a blog post discussing some undocumented OS X features that made Safari much faster than Firefox 3. And here is a blog post discussing how several apps were rejected for using undocumented functionality. And here is a whole article discussing undocumented Apple APIs, with examples of cool stuff that only Apple's own software is allowed to do. And here is an article discussing cool things that Safari can do, that Firefox isn't allowed to do. And here is a column that claims that Apple inserts undocumented APIs and uses them in its own code for years, without ever documenting them (but presumably without breaking them because it would break Apple's own code). Even the APIs for the WiFi are undocumented.
I understand the argument that Apple doesn't want to commit to supporting these APIs forever, like Microsoft has had to do with even obscure APIs in Windows. If you use these undocumented APIs to do cool things, and Apple revises the OS, your app may break. And Apple doesn't want the customer to think it's Apple's fault that your app broke.
But I also understand the argument that some of these APIs allow for really cool stuff, which is currently reserved only for Apple. People don't like this.
As for me, give me Linux anyway. No such thing as an "undocumented" API, and there is no entity that has an unfair advantage over everyone else, and I can install any software I want.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely