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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
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.
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.
No, it's nothing like Calvinball.
In Calvinball, both players got to change the rules. With the iphone, only Apple gets to.
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?
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.
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.
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.