pdxiphone

It’s Apple’s app store.  They take 30% of whatever you make, if you make anything.  Of course before that they decide if you even gain access to their store.

As a developer you might think that they only reject apps if they violate Apple user interface guidelines, but Apple also rejects apps with nudity and politically controversial apps such as the WikiLeaks app.

Recently Apple rejected two Mindwarm city-related AddToTravel apps.  Mindwarm appealed and spoke to an Apple representative who said they were rejecting city-based apps.  Apple felt they were getting too many city apps and too many for cities of “inconsequential” size.

A censor is a censor is a censor.  Apple is the gatekeeper controlling access to “their” devices.  How do you feel about that?

Not too long ago, Yahoo relied on humans to view webpages and rank search results.  Google engineered a fully automated approach for returning pages to search queries.  Guess who won?

Apple’s approach to apps, akin to Yahoo’s approach to search, is not scalable.  The Google approach to search and to app publishing on Android, is the future.  It’s the only way to scale expression and give voice to developers.  In the end freedom will win out.  Freedom to publish your own app, just like freedom to put up a webpage.

Why does Apple reject iPhone apps?

With over 300,000 apps in the iTunes App Store and a 96% acceptance rate, that implies that over 10,000 apps have been rejected by Apple.  Mostly Apple would like you to believe that they are simply performing quality assurance and making sure that the iPhone application does something useful, adheres to user interface guidelines and does not crash.

Of course we know that those criteria are not the only ones Apple uses.  The contact sharing application Swip was initially rejected for use of an icon.  The icon was intended to be pressed to indicate the intent to initiate a swap of contact data between two iPhones.

The icon that caused the app to be rejected was:

The cryptic rejection from Apple said that the Swip app contained an Apple trademark image.

In order get the Swip app approved, the Mindwarm developer team changed the swap contact icon to:

That single change got the iPhone app accepted.