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Apple Reveals the Most Common Reasons That It Rejects Apps

Posted by timothy on from the too-fat-too-thin-too-talkative dept.

mrspoonsi writes One of the great mysteries of the App Store is why certain apps get rejected and why others don't. Apple has let a surprising number of ripoffs and clones through the store's iron gates, yet some developers face rejection for seemingly innocent apps. "Before you develop your app, it's important to become familiar with the technical, content, and design criteria that we use to review all apps," explains Apple on a new webpage called "Common App Rejections." Rejections include: Apple and our customers place a high value on simple, refined, creative, well thought through interfaces. They take more work but are worth it. Apple sets a high bar. If your user interface is complex or less than very good, it may be rejected; Apps that contain false, fraudulent or misleading representations or use names or icons similar to other Apps will be rejected.

26 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Things Apple Apparently Enforces at Random by Galaga88 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There's not enough fingers in the world to count all the awful apps that violate most of Apple's so-called "standards."

    My favorite are the apps that have a string of words from other popular apps' names in them, just to muck up the search results. And they make sure to periodically change the icon to look like another app as well.

    1. Re:Things Apple Apparently Enforces at Random by stealth_finger · · Score: 3, Interesting

      We don't iCare what it iDoes we just iCare what it iLooks like.

      --
      Wanna buy a shirt?
      https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
    2. Re:Things Apple Apparently Enforces at Random by gl4ss · · Score: 2

      yeah it's bullshit.

      anyone in the business knows that they hardly test that it starts up without crashing and that's about it.

      logging in etc - too much trouble.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    3. Re:Things Apple Apparently Enforces at Random by rasmusbr · · Score: 4, Insightful

      yeah it's bullshit.

      anyone in the business knows that they hardly test that it starts up without crashing and that's about it.

      logging in etc - too much trouble.

      What they probably do, and I'm guessing here, is fire up an automatic UI testing tool that navigates through the app and clicks at stuff in order to provoke crashes and other bugs. In addition to that I would imagine they run the app description and the app icon through some sort machine learning system that tries to identify blatant ripoffs, re-submissions of apps that have been banned in the past, etc. Apps that don't pass these tests are looked at manually.

      Again, these are my guesses.

      They also do background checks on new App store accounts to try to tie them to people who have been banned for breaking their TOS.

      The bad app makers are of course one step ahead of this at any given point in time. It's not hard to think of ways of probing the system by using fake accounts.

    4. Re:Things Apple Apparently Enforces at Random by BasilBrush · · Score: 2

      Nonsense. The existence of apps that you wouldn't have approved doesn't indicate that there weren't plenty more that were rejected.

      It's a fact that Apple has humans aided by scripts doing the reviewing. For example the reviewers sometimes catch bugs that developers never found.

      In fact this new page on Apple's Website indicates that amounts to 8% of rejections.

    5. Re:Things Apple Apparently Enforces at Random by rasmusbr · · Score: 2

      Hmm.

      Google play is down to about 30 minutes now between submitting the binary and updates beginning to roll out to users. You can do staged rollouts with stages of 0.5%, 1%, 2%, 5%, 10%, 20%, 50% and full rollout in order to detect major f-ups on your own part before they reach most users.

  2. License by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Also if they're free as in freedom.

  3. Manipulated by apple by tuppe666 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Apple PR again. In light of good press from Microsoft and android simply having more apps. IOS is falling behind in both quality and quantity. Posted from a 5.5" phone

    1. Re:Manipulated by apple by Rosyna · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yup, good news from Microsoft about Quality App Stores that never reject clearly bogus apps.

  4. Eh, not quite by hsmith · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've had an app in the store for years now that requires a login. We provide two to apple to test (one success one fail). I don't recall the last time the accounts logged in (perhaps version 1.0.0.0), their last login date has sat the same for years. So, not hard if you get in and sit there to slowly change to something malicious.

    1. Re:Eh, not quite by Assmasher · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Dooood, don't make them angry. I had a hard enough time getting the damn reviewer to actually use the login (Apple/Apple.)

      It was rejected TWICE in a row after 3 weeks of waiting because "it appears to require login account information" - despite a VERY clear explanation of how the app works and why you need to login and properly filling out the testing account entries in iTunesConnect, et cetera.

      I started to think they were employing monkeys over there.

      Just like you, every submission after the first acceptance - ZERO account activity on the apple demo account ;).

      --
      Loading...
    2. Re:Eh, not quite by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      I have had the same experience. I have ALWAYS included login/demo account information and - no exaggeration - they have never successfully read the information that tells them how to log in. Always ends up something that I need to send them in a follow up.

      Once they used credentials from the review notes that I included in a completely different product!! It was like they tried to avoid the information that I provided for the app that was being reviewed.

  5. All about the brand by sideslash · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have dealt with App Store rejections on various projects, and it was quite a culture shock coming from the desktop development world. In many ways it reminded me of college. Giving the right answer is not important per se, but rather just providing the answer you know the professor/grader wants to hear. As a programmer, it rankles me for someone else to dictate major issues of app architecture that touch on quality in a debatable way.

    But it's their way or the highway if you want to sell to iOS users. And yes, you do want to sell to iOS users. Android users never spend any money. /slight-exaggeration

    1. Re:All about the brand by tepples · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But it's their way or the highway if you want to sell to iOS users. And yes, you do want to sell to iOS users. Android users never spend any money. /slight-exaggeration

      So to whom should one sell, say, an app for monitoring a wireless network or a video game in a historical fiction setting? Apple provides no public API for enumerating nearby SSIDs, and under Guidelines 15.3, Apple would reject games whose "enemies" are a particular organization (such as soldiers in a particular country's army).

    2. Re:All about the brand by quietwalker · · Score: 2

      I had the same experience.

      I get the feeling that they're inundated with apps, and they have a minimum-wage staff that's probably working in some outsourced Pune office, and they just follow the guidelines, literally. They go down a check list - and the guidelines are more specific than what they're posting here - if it passes, it passes. If it's not on the checklist, they don't care.

      So it's not about 'good design' - since that's subjective, and that's hard to write a spec to - or to outsource. Instead, it probably has rules like "Capitalization is allowed for the first letter of the title of the app only: Extreme Snowboarding is fine, eXtreme Snowboarding is not.". They just go down this list of rules, and as long as you don't break them, you're fine. Some minor subjective decision making must be involved, since an app can be rejected, immediately resubmitted, and then accepted with no changes, but for the most part it's just rote.

      My guess is that, like everything else Apple, they feel that if they publish the actual criteria, they'll lose control of some of their intellectual property, or people will be able to game the system or something. They have a real problem with control after all.

  6. High bar? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Such a subjective phrase. Looking at the App Store I doubt they even begin to comprehend its meaning. For every semi decent app there are a few thousand absolute shites copying the function. For every blockbuster app there's a few million trying to be it.

    Absolute rubbish.

  7. No right answer by blueshift_1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I feel like this is basically the same issue as the "Displaying Top Apps" discussion from a while back. There's no great way or perfect rule to solve the issue. You somehow need to make it flexible enough to be able to work for every possible kind of app, but also strict enough to keep out the riff raff. You have to make some kind of judgement to help the user and the developer both... which at some point will annoy both parties. In my experience, it works well enough. Sure it could be better (and also worse), but it seems to do the job well enough.I just feel like by making them stricter it'd have plenty of seen and unforseen consequences.

  8. The guidelines used to be paywalled by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    Why does Slashdot constantly rehash the "reasons Apple rejects apps" topic?

    To help certain iOS fans who frequent Slashdot (BB, SK, etc.) understand why not all apps are ported to iOS and why some people choose devices that run something other than iOS. The featured article states that most applications that Apple rejects are broken in some important way. But conspicuous by omission are apps that aren't broken but which Apple rejects for other reasons.

    They've published detailed guidelines on this for years.

    Only very recently (a few months ago) has Apple made the guidelines available to the public. Previously you had to sign up for the paid iOS Developer Program just to see them. That hurt people who bought a Mac and an iOS device to start developing, only to learn that the application's concept was in a category of applications that Apple completely rejects. That's entire sections of the market that Apple has made a business decision to decline to serve.

    1. Re:The guidelines used to be paywalled by Rosyna · · Score: 2

      So if you can't id a user by any characteristics of the phone either (like device id or phone#), how can you create an external unique key to id the user in case he reinstalls? i.e. you effectively can't build an app that references your external server to provide data to that app?

      (obviously not an Apple dev here...)

      Correct. You're not supposed to. If a user uninstalls an app, ALL data relevant to the app must be deleted, including any UUID. UUIDs are keyed to a specific app install. There should be no way to uniquely identify a user across installs.

    2. Re:The guidelines used to be paywalled by tepples · · Score: 2

      Amazon, Dropbox, and several other web sites use an e-mail address as the primary key. What does the flow in the Amazon, Kindle reader, and Dropbox apps for iOS look like to create a username and associate it with the user's account?

    3. Re:The guidelines used to be paywalled by perryizgr8 · · Score: 2

      So how would Dropbox work? New account every time you install? Kind of useless as a cloud storage app, though.

      --
      Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
  9. And the reason I'll never go with an i* device by afidel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    or only applies to a small niche market, it may not be approved

    I've got android apps with only 5-10k downloads, but they fit my needs. One is Fulio Pro, a nice little application for tracking fuel usage and car expenses, the developer has been very open to enhancement requests and quick to respond on bug tickets. The guy certainly hasn't gotten rich at $10-20k in earnings from the paid app, but he's got some income and I have a useful application.

    --
    There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  10. ui consistency is very important. by resfilter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    i have to hand apple one thing, about their walled garden. although i have some cool android apps on my phone, my wife's iphone is much more of a pleasure to use.

    why? because, for example, there are ten thousand friggn' notepad apps for android, and i'm too lazy to find one that look like the rest of the android interface, so after browsing through a dozen, i just picked one...

    click her notepad app, and it looks like im just smoothly entering another part of the iphone experience... ... click mine, and i'm launched into an ugly frenzy of badly placed wrongly colored controls etc with entry fields that behave strangely, and buttons with icons that i don't recognize.

    when you have 1000 developers making 1000 apps that do the same thing, the only difference being how the ui looks, and none of them even match the rest of the operating system, you fucked up your operating system. that's android for you. nobody even knows what an android app is really supposed to look like anymore, and developers don't care, they're just off in their own little world with no taste in design.

    graphical operating systems need fairly strict ui design conventions. period. they need to be breakable, but encouraged very strongly to the point of where breaking them for no reason makes your app seen as a peice of junk. this is apple's only real advantage in locking out outside apps, being able to blacklist ugly things.

    i appluade them for attempting to force that kind of consistency on their device, not that it always works... no solution is 100%.

    not that i'd buy an iphone myself, and you don't have to either. just sayin'.

  11. Blame FSF not Apple ... by perpenso · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Also if they're free as in freedom.

    With respect to he VLC media player ... Apple didn't care it was GPL, the developer was OK with the App Store, but a 3rd party threatened to sue Apple so Apple pulled the app.

    "The iOS VLC app was created by Applidium, a French mobile software company. In an Ars Technica interview, Applidium co-founder Romain Goyet said "The way I see it, we're not violating anyone's freedom. We worked for free, opened all our source code, and the app is available for free for anyone to download. People are enjoying a nice free and open source video player on the AppStore, and some people are trying to ruin it in the name of 'freedom.'" ... In a follow-up VideoLAN mailing list post, VideoLAN association president Jean-Baptiste Kempf wrote, "With 'friends' like you, we don't need any enemies. If I understand correctly, the FSF new policy is to blow up communities?""
    http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open...

    The FSF argues that Apple prohibits modifying and/or redistributing the app. That is a somewhat bogus argument. The binary is digitally signed, it won't run if modified or transferred to another device lacking the appropriate key. However the source code is available. A user is free to modify and distribute in terms of source code. They can submit their modified alternative binary to the app store. They can give a few friends binaries via ad hoc distribution. Yes, this costs money. The GPL doesn't prohibit things costing money, you can charge for distribution if you like and people are free to ignore your distribution and go to the source code. Nor does the GPL doesn't mandate a free developer environment.

    Its seems the FSF has far more to do with GPL apps not being on iOS than Apple.

    1. Re:Blame FSF not Apple ... by Whiney+Mac+Fanboy · · Score: 2

      the developer was OK with the App Store, but a 3rd party threatened to sue Apple so Apple pulled the app.

      This statement is bogus. 3rd parties cannot sue under copyright law. VLC is developed by multiple parties, some of whom wanted VLC in the app store & others who didn't.

      Portraying this as Apple & VLC vs the FSF is a misrepresentation of the situation.

      --
      There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
    2. Re:Blame FSF not Apple ... by jbolden · · Score: 2

      Oh OK well if you want criticisms:

      Worksheets are too complex to use. The navigation isn't intuitive. First off worksheets should open in edit mode. The sample values in grey shouldn't be zeros but rather something like a valid sample calculation or the manual should have a walk through for each worksheet and when the user hits manual it goes to that page with a sample. I'm a pretty smart guy whose been using advanced calculators for a quarter century and I can't figure out how to use most of the worksheets.