App Rejections

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, but for some reason, this time it’s all okay. La de da.

No details from Matt, but my guess is that this was a plain re-submission, inspired by the (eventual) success of other, overly political, apps, such as Bobble Rep (OVERTURNED).

The rejection of Minipops had two frustrating aspects. Firstly, this was an app whose core content contained very little in the way of parody – in particular, the examples that Apple cited in their rejection letter seemed to have nothing offensive at all.

Secondly, the Apple reviewer didn’t appear to bother to explain precisely which content they were rejecting. The app has two parts – the core content (images), and the secondary content (commentary / text).

(Apple): we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement

By deduction, it seems that the reviewer objected to the text, since it’s hard to see how the image content cited could in any way be offensive.

But most of the text cited is also extremely hard to find cause for rejection in.

So …which was it? Who knows?

Apple’s rejections are better these days, and I hope we won’t see more rejections as unhelpful as Minipops (this happened many months ago). I find this a particularly neat and simple example of how it wasn’t enough for Apple reviewers to cite a vague paragraph in the official docs, and include a few (non-annotated) screenshots.