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Google Voice, probably the single highest-profile app-rejection of all time – the app that sparked a US Government inquiry into Apple’s business practices – is back:
we’re excited to introduce the Google Voice web app for the iPhone and Palm WebOS devices. This HTML5 application provides you with a fast and versatile mobile experience for Google [...]
A lot of press has appeared declaring that Apple is now “allowing” 3G phone calls (i.e. you can make calls using your *free* data plan, instead of paying AT&T, O2, etc), citing iCall as the first accepted 3G VoIP app. The truth, it seems, is a little more subtle. It’s true that iCall is live [...]
It used to be that Apple declared “no porn on the App Store”. Although that’s changed to “lots of porn”, it’s all softcore or ultra softcore – things that many parents would let their children see anyway. But anything that comes close to actual sex is still summarily rejected. Or … maybe not. Sex [...]
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From Erica Sadun, a great idea – a tool that checks your source code, and hilights one of the things that is likely to cause “automatic” rejection by Apple: using private methods, or private method names. Now in beta, APIkit:
it’s a developer response to Apple’s automated API scanning system, offering a proactive heads-up about method [...]
A lot of apps have been rejected recently for using this particular private method, but here’s an interesting case where two versions of the same app got different results, only a few days apart. The paid-version, Gravity Sling Deluxe, got rejected first:
Thank you for submitting Gravity Sling Deluxe to the App Store.
Unfortunately it cannot be [...]
Minipops, which *barely* parodies public figures, was originally rejected back in May, but is now up in the app store:
I got an email over the weekend from Matt (the clever guy who made the app work) saying he’d resubmitted it and it had been approved. Some of you may remember that it was rejected twice, [...]
Despite the name, Pussy Lovers is a family-friendly app, containing a bunch of photos of cats. The name – and the description – represent an adult joke, and apparently were enough to get it pulled from the App Store:
I received a call from someone at Apple and he said that the apps were being removed [...]
I avoided the initial rejection because there was nothign interesting about it, other than the author. However, KaChing, the app that does nothing but make a cash-register sound when you run it, has now been approved now that they’ve added a very basic feature to it and resubmitted, and that definitely *is* interesting :
So what [...]
This has bothered me for almost 12 months now: Apple has no protection against apps uploading your entire AddressBook to the web, and selling your friends’ email addresses for cash. Or worse. Dragon Dictation is a high-profile app that just got spotted doing an AddressBook upload (names only):
Dragon Dictation for the iPhone goes through your [...]
Is the policy on Private API’s gradually changing? Does it still work to contact Steve Jobs personally when begging to break the rules? Knocking shows that the answer to both those questions may be “yes”:
An Apple executive, who wishes to remain anonymous, contacted Meehan at 8:30am the following Monday morning to discuss the app and [...]