ACCEPTED: Cell Phone Tracker (fake app)
This is fascinating. Here we have an app that not only deceives in the app name (it doesn’t “track cell phones” – this may be pedantic, BUT … misnaming an app has been a cause of rejection over the past few years), but does nothing else of any use or value. It’s a joke app. The kind that Apple has been routinely rejecting; perhaps this is changing? Eloquently, from the customer reviews:
“Don’t buy this piece of anal waste…..you will murder yourself”
On the one hand … at AppRejections, we feel Apple should never have been refusing “joke” apps – rather they should have been given a clear category of their own.
On the other hand … Apple has consistently, time and time again, refused to allow this kind of app, both paid and unpaid. Why change that now? Why allow a handful of random developers the chance of fame and fortune (free apps make a lot of money too, if done right…), and not even tell the rest of us about it?
Openness: We’ve heard of it
If there were one thing I could change about Apple’s App Store it would be this (even more important than the crappy user-experience: “AppStore” is IMHO one of the worst apps on the iPhone :) ) :
Apple seems to hate openness; Apple seems to want every mistake airbrushed out of history, and every PR opportunity given a big-up. Apple has never informed developers when they’ve changed their App-Store policies. Apple has probably contributed more to the creation of “crap” iPhone apps than any other company, by their refusal to tell developers what they “should” and “should not” do…
Developer thoughts
Serious lack of quality here. There’s never a valid reason to put a Geo-Location result at (0,0) – the dead giveaway is that users complain about “somewhere in the middle of the ocean”.
lat:0 is the equator, and long:0 is the Greenwich Meridian (i.e. a line north-south through South East London) … they come together just off the south-west shore of Africa, in the Atlantic.
Lat,Long = (0,0) normally means “there’s a bug in your code, go back and test it properly”.
The high number of 1-star ratings from users declaring “I DONT LIVE IN THE OCEAN!!!! THI SAPP DOES NT WORK!!!” (or near enough approximation) suggests the app was probably hacked together in a matter of hours, with minimal testing.
