App Rejections

With Apple’s announcement that they would no longer allow apps that ask location purely for advertising purposes, I wondered how long it would take to see some rejections. If Scripture Only is anything to go by, that was pretty quick:

I got the following email after submitting an update to an app already in the App Store.

We’ve reviewed your application Scripture Only and determined that because this application does not have Core Location user features but is requesting location data, it violates section 3.3.6 of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement:

This is in there because of AdMob, and it told me to add that Core Location Framework to my code.

Of course, AdMob et al have been advising developers to disable the location-checks (usually this is a 10-second fix for developers). This is no big problem – although the ad-network documentation pages tend to be even worse than Apple’s, the libraries themselves are so simple to use that it’s usually easy to work out what to change and where.

Interesting that the rejections have started so soon, apparently “effective immediately”.

(for the record, I hate the way apps have been so aggresive about asking for location, especially the ad networks, chasing higher profits – and indeed it’s arguably illegal in Europe, since there are no age-checks, but no-one has bothered to stop and think about that. I’m very glad to see Apple rejecting based on pointless location checks; no-one should be tracking location without very good reason)