App Rejections

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 its rejection. He revealed that the order to reverse the app’s rejection came “directly from the top.” Within three hours of the phone call, Knocking Live Video was approved for sale via the App Store.

We don’t have evidence that the appeal to Steve Jobs worked – we don’t even know exactly how it happened (an email sent to steve@apple? An address probably handled by 4 separate PA’s…). But we do know that’s what the developer *tried* to do:

When it was rejected, I decided not to give up and reach out directly to Steve Jobs via e-mail…[claiming] that [it] was not about me or our app, rather about being a life-long user of all Apple products, about how I believed in Apple and that I believed Jobs would respond.

Ars Technica ruminates that “persuading Steve Jobs to personally approve an app is probably not going to become an official policy”. I disagree. ANYTHING THAT WORKS immediately gets jumped on by hundreds (or thousands) of developers, because so much of Apple’s “official” processes work so poorly by comparison…

Oh, Apple, you’re *really* going to regret this one…

At first, I thought this was great – video over 3G is something that Apple needed to approve on the iPhone in order to preserve their lead over the upcoming Android stuff. It’s a great way of grabbing the public’s imagination, just as Pam Pre and Android phones are starting to become viable competitors to the basic iPhone.

But looking wider, Apple has screwed this up pretty badly.

They’ve done two things that will result in a lot more rudeness towards Apple’s review staff, and a lot more attempts to beg / bully them into accepting Private API’s. This is a disaster for the whole static-analyser approach to the submission process – With this move, Apple might as well have declared “we hate that analyser, we’re getting rid of it”. They’ve just:

1. Implied that it’s best to ignore every App Reviewer, and beg Apple management instead, because the former will be over-ruled by the latter
2. Publically sanctioned a very high-profile app whose only sin was to use “Private API’s” – so now *everyone*’s going to feel they have a chance at doing so

But that’s not all. Now that this whole saga has publicised a particular private API, an Israeli tech company has decided to jump on the bandwagon.

They’ve put out a press release (although … not a lawsuit yet, so far as I can tell – despite what a lot of news sites are claiming) to say that they … vaguely … have something to do with the tech. This is a typical strategy by a patent-holder: without going to a lot more expense, they cannot get hold of the data they’d need to prove Apple’s infringing, so they give the opposition a chance to settle at lower cost.

Of course, the same tactic is used by companies with crappy patents that they know won’t hold up in court, where they simply hope that the victim company will cave in without a fight. So, frankly, we’ve no idea what will happen next.