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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.'"
with the current open ended terms, there is no way this book could be a complete set... "just 'cause" will always still be an option for apple.
Make something innovative enough, Apple will co-opt it (cut-paste, tethering) and forget what they said previously about it and then delete your app from the store.
It probably would be better to have a plan to offer it to jailbroken iPhones to at least reduce losses.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Didn't Micro$oft have API's that they used and didn't want anyone else to use? Didn't they get lambasted for that?
Twin or more? ITA
Apache/Spring/La
Could we PLEASE try to go even a single day without some apple-based story? My god, there's more to the world of science and technology than a single company!
Canada attempting to pass a bill to put filesharing along the same lines as in the USA?
Info on the oil leak?
Hewlett-Packard cutting 9000 jobs?
To hell with all of that, someone somewhere posted something about Apple!
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
One app got rejected. There's plenty other ones, including Pandora.
It's just some fluff article to get them clickthroughs.
I don't get that one either. I'm listening to Pandora Internet Radio on my iPhone right now.
You know, the fact that there are other options is not a valid reason to simply shut up and accept Apple's capriciousness. Merely taking other options is worthless as a force for change unless you also make it known why you took the alternative.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
>This isn't the 90's and Apple isn't MS
No, its the 2000s and one of the largest smartphone OSs is iPhone (50 million units sold). Lets not forget their near perfect monopoly on music players, which are little more than smartphones sans phone and are binary compatible with ipod/ipad.
Also, in the 1990s no one made you buy Microsoft. You could always have bought a Mac or run a maturing Linux, like today. Harmful monopolies are funny things. In retrospect they are easy to spot, but when you in the midst of one its easy to justify them.
>They don't have to open up their hardware or software to anyone else, and no court is going to make them.
I dont think anyone is suggesting that, but pointing out Apple's rotten policies is a social good, at least in my book. It keeps the consumers informed and the bad publicity will hurt them enough in the long run. We're pretty much witnessing Steve Jobs circa 1980s all over again. He's going to fight for closed and expensive while his competitors will fight for open and cheap(er). Closed and expensive has early advantages but not much staying power.
They used to have a game called Calvinball where the rules were made up as they played the game and ever changing. Dealing with Apple (or even thier bedmate ATT) is a lot like playing CB....sigh
sig loading.......
You may be wrong there. Once a product has a large enough market share, monopoly regulations come into play, whether there are competitors or not. Especially if you use your market share in one market to gain share in a different market. Which is precisely why Microsoft had to change some things - even though there were dozens of other operating systems and office products.
And the share of the smartphone market that Apple holds might just be big enough, especially when seen in the context of their market share of the music player market.
The link between iTunes, iPod and iPhone shouldn't be seen as fundamentally different from the link between MS Windows, MS Internet Explorer and MS Office.
If your app does anything that might make it bigger than The Phone, then you screwed up. Apple wants their customers to always have in mind that they're using an iPhone; not your apps on an iPhone. Same reason Valentino Rossi won't get to race on a Ducati.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The reality distortion field that Jobs invented works well. Too bad Microsoft never got one.
Great Intellect...
And by that logic movie critics should never write bad reviews, because nobody's forcing them to watch those movies. If Apple is acting immorally, what is wrong with calling them out on it?
Part of the problem is that these ways are not sure-fire.
The app reviewers are overloaded and the app review process gets gummed up, and so sometimes mistakes are made and things are not enforced consistently. So, you can have an app that gets through the process just fine for a while, and then gets rejected. Sometimes, it should have been rejected to begin with, but wasn't, and that makes people think that what they're doing is okay, and they got an explicit "wink" and approval.
The (specific, not only) problem is that inconsistent enforcement makes it seem more like there are inconsistent rules than is actually the case.
*gasp* You mean a an article by McAllister might twists facts around in an article for nothing more than to drive hits to his blog? Say it ain't so!!!!
On the one hand, Apple is trying to regulate its 'image' and reputation when it allows apps to be sold on their store.
And their image has come down to a fundamentally broken OS and related technologies which claim "revolutionary" new features which are really things that people said that iPhone OS needed from day one.
Even the non-geeks are starting to realize it, when they can get the full web experience from Android and not from Apple, cheaper, more available devices from Android, they are switching to Android.
Apple has had several chances to have redeemed itself and each time has thrown away their chances. From not allowing multiple carriers in the US, not allowing various apps, refusing to allow Flash, being so slow to implement things that every other smartphone OS has like copy and paste along with multitasking, etc.
Really, how many times have you thought "I'd really like to get this smartphone platform, but there are a few apps in here that I don't agree with and it drags down the entire platform" . My guess is never.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The article calls that out:
Return7 seems reasonably upset about this. After all, every other Internet radio site remains in the App Store, and, again, three previous versions of CastCatcher were approved. It claims there is nothing in this new version that would require more bandwidth than any of the other streaming radio services.
It's just Apple's app review as usual. At this point, with all the evidence we have, I think it's reasonable to conclude that it's based mainly on wave function collapse.
Look and feel is why we buy Apple. We expect to do certain things in certain ways. There are some things that will always be wanted. It is like cup holders. Just because some consumers buy cars based on cup holders does not mean that we should all have to drive car with 23 cup holders.
It is a flawed analogy. No-one is asking for that. What people want is the ability to add extra cupholders to their car in case they need them (and apparently many people do!). But Apple only lets you install anything into your machine in its own service centers, and they only offer a limited range of options.
Also, "iTunes sync over WiFi" = "cupholder", seriously?
This has been discussed ad infintum. I think battery life should take precedence over developers wanting to take the easy way out. I pay for code to be good.
The Flash aspect has been discussed ad infinitum. However, there isn't any good reason why a user cannot run an application which is an interpreter (and advertised as such), rather than uses an interpreter internally (and does not advertise it).
I mean, seriously, what does a HyperCard implementation - which the user would have to explicitly feed code to run - have to do with battery life?
I have no idea on this one. I think if people had not felt they had a god given right to infinite bandwidth ATT would still be selling unlimited plans.
Bandwidth usage is something that should be strictly between the user and his mobile provider. Then, of course, if Internet radio is a serious network strain, then iPhone "3G" is a misnomer.
When Apple posted GPL content and then removed it, the general rational EFF cried foul, even though Apple really did nothing wrong. People assume that if it is in the Apple store, then Apple can be blamed.
A GPL violation is a definite copyright infringement, though; there's no shady ground here. But a BitTorrent client? They're not illegal. And the app in question isn't even that - it's simply an UI to control a BitTorrent client running on a computer remotely.
Kind of like don't put OS X on anything but Apple hardware, or else we'll take away your licenses and sue you into submission?
I certainly totally hate it when some useful app vanishes or new rules pop up out of nothing, but on the other hand I can somehow understand that Apple has to make the rules as it goes along. I mean, if they'd put up clear rules and would stick to these, developers would instantly start to find loopholes and to work around them, naturally. And for Apple the iPhone/iPad platform is what they bet their future on. And this platform is still at a very early stage. They do not want to be the dog with which the tail waggles.
Apple (and the Mac and OS X) has more than once suffered from others having too much control over things. Like Adobe with taking ages to port their apps to Intel Macs because they did not use XCode in the first place. Imagine Apple allowing Flash and any kind of programming language and compilers and middleware and then, 4 or 6 years on, they try to go to a totally different hardware platform (which *will* happen sooner or later, be assured). Suddenly they'd have a large amount of apps they couldn't offer any migration tools for then and be at the whim of some third party (or worse, hundreds of them). Look at Microsoft -- Windows and all its apps are married to Intel and the flood of ARM platforms for tablets is totally out of bounds for MS here. There is absolutely no way to port Windows and all applications to another platform. Trapped.
For Google, Android itself and its apps is still a minor thing. Google does not sell systems. As long as they get your data and your eyes, they can allow Android apps to go whereever they go. They don't actually care.
Really, I'm somewhat happy that there's more than one way. All of this is a large experiment and attacking the problems from more than one angle is good. Freedom is not when everyone does the same.
Once a product has a large enough market share, monopoly regulations come into play, whether there are competitors or not. Especially if you use your market share in one market to gain share in a different market. Which is precisely why Microsoft had to change some things - even though there were dozens of other operating systems and office products. And the share of the smartphone market that Apple holds might just be big enough, especially when seen in the context of their market share of the music player market.
The link between iTunes, iPod and iPhone shouldn't be seen as fundamentally different from the link between MS Windows, MS Internet Explorer and MS Office.
This is what has been floating in my head, but I've been unable to put into words. Excellent comment!
The link between iTunes, iPod and iPhone shouldn't be seen as fundamentally different from the link between MS Windows, MS Internet Explorer and MS Office.
You mean besides abusive contractual obligations to third parties, like Pay for a Windows license even if you're shipping Linux on a computer, or else we'll take away all your licenses?
Yeah, that's nothing like an absent set of rules for the biggest smartphone OS and it's locked in store. There's nothing abusive when Apple chooses to reject apps that do what Apple does, or wants to do in the future. How about rejecting an app that was previously approved based on an update? Don't update your app, Apple might revoke the entire thing!
While I still disagree with the monopoly theories, the biggest leverage you're missing is leveraging iTunes and the iPod dominance to gain smartphone market dominance. Playing your iTunes purchased music is (typically) more effort on non-apple smartphones and may even be impossible on some. Personally I don't think anything is to the point of screaming at the Feds to get involved (iPod and iPhone market share are each significant but not a monopoly), but it is worthy of the raised eyebrows it's getting.
So no, the link isn't fundamentally different, but the results are. When the Apple market dominance in music players and smartphones rivals Microsoft's in OSes and web browsers, then take action. Until then.... business as usual I suppose.
+1 Disagree
They are a moving (some might say evolving) target and are most definitely an unknown quantity. Some might say that their "keep'm guessing" style is to their benefit and keeps fans champing at the bit, but for people who are interested in operating a business on their platform, they are anything but stable, reliable or predictable. If there was ever any wonder why Apple hasn't taken over, this paints the most clear and current picture as to why. People bought into iPod and iPhone but it won't be long before Apple pushes enough developers away that those same developers start making really great things for other platforms. Once that happens, all the slick commercials and designs won't keep new customers coming.
Apple is like a controlling, abusive spouse. You either live with them or you divorce them. In time, though, people will start pitying you and questioning your judgement as to why you stay with them.
No, its a reason to vote with your dollars (whether as an end-user or someone investing in app development) and reject Apple's capriciousness.
Whining while rewarding Apple's capriciousness has counterproductive effects.
1- Does that make them right ?
2- Does that invalidate attempts at trying to try and understand their logic (if any) and not be banned from their store ?
3- Does that make efforts to publicize their behaviour superfluous ?
Apple isn't MS: MS never treated their devs this badly.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
"No, its the 2000s..."
Man, how do I break the news to him that we're in the 10's now?
True, but it's not what Apple is doing. Apple is
1- forcing devs to learn THEIR dev tools, so that they get invested in Apple's ecosystem
2- enforcing control of what is sold, and above all who's selling it. Like for the "risque" but not porn" apps, it seems there's significantly less risk of being banned when you're big/official... My take is, they don't care for the little guys, only big names get attention.
The "cross-platform dev tools lead to bad apps" line bunk: a majority of all available iPhone Apps could have been developped with whatever, with no loss of functionnality, and they're clearly NOT vetting apps on quality.
Let's all pray Android ends this greedy madness. MS is now taking the same "Welcome to MY playpen" tack, which should mean it's on its last legs ^^
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
You got what you deserved for working with oligarchs. What did you expect?
A little life advice, you know that girl you call every 2-3 days for 2 weeks, but never actually meet? Well, she's just not that into you. Apple'a App store is a pretty similar situation. You should either (a) get a job writing an app for people who have the clout, like say a newspaper, or (b) just changing fucking platforms.
Maemo and MeeGo are kinda a moving target right now, but one might try expanding GnuSTEP to aid porting iPhone apps. Or, if your really crazy, try writing tools to help port iPhone apps to Qt. I'm sure many iPhone developers would love having their apps run natively on Symbian phones.
Btw, GnuSTEP was originally developed by SLAC to help port HippoDraw away from the dying NeXT platform, but they eventually gave up on Objective C and NeXTSTEP's, instead choosing Qt.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
It's not so cut and dried.
It is not universally accepted that sports scores are the property of the sport any more than I can charge people for looking at a tree that grows on my front lawn. Or charge them for taking pictures of that tree and selling those pictures. Google makes money by providing a map that shows my address. Do they owe me something or do they need my permission to do so?
I can learn the score of today's baseball game without having anything to do with any Major League Baseball property. I could have heard them from a friend. I could have heard them on TV, on the radio or seen them on the front page of the newspaper sitting in the paybox on my streetcorner. I could have been at the game myself.
So, if I post here on Slashdot that the Chicago Black Hawks are now leading the Philadelphia Flyers in the Stanley Cup series by 2 games to 1, can the NHL come after me? Can they come after Slashdot? How about if I mention that my White Sox beat Tampa Bay 8-5 Sunday night? Can MLB come after me?
"Stealing content from a source"my ass. Do you believe newspapers should have to pay Major League Baseball to print last night's box score? The guy was selling an application that displayed the same information that was available in hundreds of other sources for free. How can the cricket association now claim that it is proprietary information?
You are welcome on my lawn.
At what point did I ever suggest one should do otherwise? Indeed, I have done as you said, and voted with my dollars. However, I also don't see that as a reason not to complain as well.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Well,
I have no doubt that there are issues with the way Apple handles this. However I consider this article as bad journalism. About much stuff I have a clue, and the article makes no attempt to give any explanations on how or what is going on and what is so bad about it.
However articles like this one: http://infoworld.com/d/developer-world/how-get-rejected-the-app-store-854?page=0,0/ only lead to confusion and are not really helpful (as half the claims there are arguable wrong)
I work down the list as presented in said article.
1. we all agree that (crashing) software like that has nothing to do on my mobile device, I assume? ... that sounds like bullshit to me.
2. I agree with Apple. Why should they allow to have several Mail, SMS and what ever programs on the device that ruin the platform look and feel?
3. Well, neither the article, not the linked article make clear what this is about. So I would call this bad journalism. Again: what exactly is the Wi-Fi synch thing wee are talking about here? You want to tell me if I want to synch my iPhone with my Mac it wont work over Wi-Fi? Are you sure? And Apps that make this possible get rejected? Are you really sure? If that is the case, we have a point here, but if that is truly the case what is so hard in making this explicit for noobs like me?
4. Execute interpreted code. Your comments are wrong. It has absolutely nothing to do with "interpreted" or "not interpreted". Apple considers the iPhone an End-User-Device. You can not program on it, and you should not. That is their stand of view. It has nothing to do with interpreted. Imagine a C64 Emulator that has access to the Mac OS X API and is able to "format" the "HD" of the iPhone. Nightmare!
5. Use too much bandwidth. The whole explanation makes no sense at all. First of all internet radio streams only us 2 or 3 times the bandwidth a phone call does. Secondly, a provider like AT&T perfectly knows which connections over his network do what. So instead of dropping a phone call because of network saturation the provider easily can drop a true bandwidth hogger. Blocking an App because it might use bandwidth makes no sense
6. No idea about this. All I can find about this is pretty weird. I had expected that the author of this article had worked on that so we as his readers get an ida what is really going on. However: The App Store is no democracy, which might be why Apple doesn't feel inclined to support free speech. First off all: Free speech or not free speech is something different. Supposed there is a ruler and some citizen says: "that ruler sucks." In a society honouring free speech that citizen can say this unharmed. In a society not honouring free speech the ruler might call for his head. Why do you want to imply that an App that does not get published, for what reason ever, is somehow violating "free speech principles"? Claims like that are a slap into the face of people all over the world that fight for free speech in their countries. You dare to compare a not published App in a Store that belongs to Apple, where Apple has all rights to do what they ever want (not rights: privileges even) with "free speech issues"? Hello, get a real live man!
7. Use Apple's APIs (without permission). Oh my god. The biggest bullshit in this article. First of all the (without permission) part. It implies that some Programmers have the permission to use those APIs. If you have an App on your iPhone, you expect it to continue to work after a system upgrade, or not? If that App uses a "secret API" and that API got changed during the upgrade, the App will likely crash, or not? Whom do you blame? The stupid moron who used secret/unofficial/undocumented APIs or the System Upgrade? Stuff like this bullshit only one who has no clue about programming can write.
8. Use someone else's stuff. No comment about this but I doubt the
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I think people with popular "rejected" apps should put them (maybe they already are?) on Cydia. My iPhone has been much more useful (and has a prettier interface) since I started getting my apps from there.
Apple is trying to create a walled garden and are desperate to own the content because they know that pretty soon everyone is going to catch up with OS X in terms of usability and then they will just be another also choice. I give it another 5 maybe 10 years at the outside until most OSes are pretty much the same in terms of look and feel and usability, baring anything stupid in terms of software patents.
So Apple knows that since its days are numbered they need to own or control the content. Which is why the do everything they do. They don't care about the OS any more, they care about owning and controlling the content now.
As for the walled garden, we all know how well that worked out for AOL and other similar companies. The walled garden approach almost never works because there ends up always being something outside of the walled garden that people want. Walled gardens will never work in the long term.
I think Apple is just scared to death of the future repeating itself and Apple being a nothing on it last legs in 5+ years, like it was 5-10 years ago. So they are willing to do anything to try and make that not happen, including doing stupid things that make it happen faster.
If it is all about the OS then Linux is going to eat Apple's lunch given enough time, and every time. There is very little that OS X has currently that isn't available in Linux. Plus Linux being open source and free means more and more companies who don't want to pay an OS tax are using it. Linux is showing up everywhere on every kind of device you can think of, and neither Apple or Microsoft can hire enough programmers to combat that level adoption or features being added by so many companies and developers. Is Linux perfect? No, but it gets better all the time, and what is clear is that Linux is good enough for a lot of things currently. Perhaps Linux isn't prefect for everything, at least not yet, but that will change in time.
Steve Jobs knows he won't be at the head of Apple forever and probably won't be around after another 10 years, so he has to do whatever he thinks he can to make Apple be able to survive when he is gone so they don't have a repeat of what he sees as the past failures while he was gone. In the end the more he or anyone else tries to put a tight grip on things to control them, the more they lose control of the very thing they want to control.
Microsoft learned long ago, you want your platform to succeed then you need to win the minds of developers. It seems Apple never really learned this, or at least not well. The more Apple pisses off developers the faster they will become an also or a has-been.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Developers are still writing apps for the platform, aren't they?
Here's the deal. You get access to the iPod and iPhone user base ... maybe ... for as long as it pleases Apple for you to have that. You take the calculated risk that Apple will accept your app, and continue accepting that app long enough for you to recoup your investment. There are no guarantees that it will please Apple to continuing doing so, any more than there are guarantees that users will buy your app.
I don't understand why people agonize over this like its some kind of betrayal, or like Apple owes them something. As far as Apple is concerned they own not only the platform, but the customers for that platform and every aspect of the user experience. What part of that hasn't been made abundantly clear yet? Oh, there are certain well known things you can do to avoid getting your app banned, but Apple could decide tomorrow to change the rules. They could even ban your app because they decide it's not consistent with the image they want to project.
As long as there are plenty of app developers who willing to develop on those terms (basically nothing is guaranteed), and Apple has never pretended otherwise, why should Apple do anything for you? It'd be different if they'd promised you anything like control over your own destiny, or openness, or transparency, or even a fair shake. But they haven't. They promised you a crapshoot, and that's what you get. It's their rules, and those rules are "what we say goes, and we don't owe you any explanation." The only people who might in some conceivable scenario have any cause for complaint are the stockholders, but those circumstances haven't arisen yet.
So, iPhone developers, if you don't like Apple's terms, eat it, or move on. Apple never forced you to develop for the platform, and they aren't forcing you to stay.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I am also an iPhone OS developer and have had no problem working with Apple and the App Store so I am curious about the fervor surrounding rejections. I have some simple questions to ask you:
1. How much research did you do into the information licensing that may surround the data you were aggregating?
I ask this because I created a drink recipe and general bartending app and I had to do quite a bit of research into what is and is not copyrighted, trademarked, etc. before we began development. I found out through that research that drink names can be copyrighted, but recipes cannot, for instance. As a parallel to your case in the sporting world, the National Football League (NFL), retains the rights to all information, statistics, visual and audio accounts of games, etc. You CANNOT reproduce any American football game, publish stats, etc., etc. without the "express written permission of the NFL". Now, a developer may have a problem with that, and if they created a NFL app for the Apple App Store it would probably be rejected and they might face legal action from the NFL, but that's not Apple's fault. Frankly, that was just well intentioned ignorance on the developer's part for not doing their homework.
2. How many applications have you self published?
Again, I ask this because there are TONS of legal issues that surround publishing applications, especially those that aggregate the work of others or otherwise rely on a pre-existing event, creative work, etc. I don't deny that your application was a "good idea", but it wasn't well thought out from a legal perspective and it eventually caught up to you. I have personally rejected app ideas from my developers and business partners specifically because they were based on someone else's idea in another arena. I rejected a "Wrap It Up" app because I was worried that Dave Chappelle's people would come after us and sue us for ripping off his idea. There have been a few others along those lines, where the idea sounded good in a vacuum, but would potentially create legal issues in the real world and get us sued. Don't want that.
I will admit, that there have been some odd rejections in the App Store from time-to-time, but a majority of the cases I've seen are clearly violations of Apple's SDK Agreement, or are targets for copyright or trademark infringement. I think your ire in this case would be better directed at the IPL, but if it's anything like the NFL ... good luck with that! This certainly wasn't a case where Apple did something wrong. They pulled an application that was clearly violating a legal copyright to information and its distribution. In this crazy intellectual property hoarding world we are currently in you have to do your homework and make an educated decision about what applications may or may not violate someone else's rights.
Do you think newspapers pay for the right to list MLB scores?
ESPN has to get rights to show highlights from games, yes, but you can't copyright facts. If I use an MLB logo, or a team logo, or footage from the game, I have to pay or get permission. But I don't need permission to write, on my blog, that the Flyers beat the Black Hawks 3 to 2 in game three of the Stanley Cup finals. I don't need permission to say that a certain ballplayer is hitting .283 or that a different ballplayer got a hit in last night's game.
You are welcome on my lawn.