[OT] A tale of App Store rejection

[Andre Garzia]

Hey Folks,

I am sharing here an experience with the iOS App Store.

I live in the beautiful city of Niterói in the state of Rio de Janeiro (as
seen in http://fon.nu/15DD13EL). Most of the citizens of my city work in
the city of Rio de Janeiro.

There are two ways to go from here to Rio. There is the ferry boat which
takes 20 minutes but has queues so long that you can wait an hour and a
half to board and there is the famous Rio - Niterói bridge that spans 13km
and is the only reasonable way to get to rio by car or bus. The problem is
that the bridge tends to be tangled in huge traffic jams that can last
forever. So people here face a dilemma, should I take a bus to Rio or a
ferry boat. Millions of people suffer that every day, twice a day, on the
way into Rio and on the way out of Rio.

So to help myself and others, I created this app that can be seen here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amoralabs.eponte

It displays in very large letters the current state of the traffic in the
bridge and if you want, you can see more details about how it got that way.

I built the little backend server thingy that figures out how the bridge is
and serve as the place that this thin stack connects to get information.

The application has 413 installations here, mostly because I don't make any
marketing.

So after releasing on Android, I decided to release it on iOS. I did all
the juggling and uploaded it to Apple and a week later they rejected it
because it was too simple, didn't provide enough features or lasting
entertainment and could be done as a website. Well, 3G connection here is
not as widespread as in New York so opening a web page on your cell phone
every time you want to check on the bridge is a waste of resources and
time. My app transmits a very small string so even on edge, it can figure
out the traffic easily. Also, this app is actually useful to the thousands
of iphone owners who commutes to Rio every day but Apple seems to prefer
fart apps and thus my app is not coming to iOS.

The lesson here is beware of your features because the app store is getting
very picky. Minimal applications that provide a single useful feature are
no longer good enough for them. Heck my app wasn't even ugly as some stuff
there. Anyway, I just wanted to share the experience for the benefit of
those that are building apps as small as mine.

This app was built in a day, including the server. It was a "dare" from a
friend who said: "how fast can you build something to check on the bridge
for Android?" and I said "fast."

At least people on Android can enjoy easy access to the traffic conditions.

Cheers
andre


-- 
http://www.andregarzia.com -- All We Do Is Code.
http://fon.nu -- minimalist url shortening service.