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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.
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
The problem with using Apple's private APIs is that they tend to be unstable, and there are no guarantees that they won't change. Apple would very much rather that half the apps in their store didn't break because of an OS update that changes an undocumented API. And they've always been good about making private APIs public once they stabilize, so it's not as big a deal as this guy makes it sound.
Warning: Contents May Be Flammable. Keep Out Of Reach Of Children.
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.
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?
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.)
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.
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