[OT] A tale of App Store rejection

[J. Landman Gay]

On 1/17/13 6:50 AM, Andre Garzia wrote:

> 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.

I'm sorry you had to go through that. One of my clients got rejected for 
a similar reason -- the app wasn't "interactive" enough. He got no 
reasonable response with an appeal, just a form letter that basically 
said the same thing as the first rejection. We finally figured out that 
Apple wants the app to do something that can't be done on the web alone, 
or as an ebook.

So we added a "notes" feature where users could jot their own comments 
about some of the info, and the ability to send feedback in real time to 
the author. Those two additions made it acceptable and it's now in the 
App Store.

I agree they are getting very picky. I think at first they only wanted 
volume and would accept nearly anything to get the numbers higher. Now 
they are looking at content and performance, and I think part of that is 
because they are pushing their ebook solution. Anything that can be made 
into an ebook will not be accepted as an app, and anything that could be 
a read-only web page will also be rejected.

I think if you could add something that is user-specific it would be 
accepted. Maybe the user could turn on an alarm to notify them when 
traffic is low, or something like that. I think it has to be personal to 
the user, not a generic interaction.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com