App Rejections

Reddit.com has long had an iPhone app (iReddit), but has finally given up on the app store, after one-too-many mistaken rejections by Apple:

We’ve had too many legitimate bugfixes rejected from the store because the reviewer of the patch happened to check on a day when someone made a poop joke or our thumbnailer did a particularly good job detecting the raciest image on the page. Nevermind pointing out that the content for the app comes from the web and that we didn’t put the poop joke in there just for them, but all this has been said before and will be said again.

Details here are sketchy, but it’s a sufficiently high profile website I think it’s worth covering. The app isn’t pulled, just killed. They’ve also open-sourced it, making it interresting to watch: its under Conde Nast’s account, and I’d be impressed if CN were brave enough to publish user-submitted code. More likely, you’ll just have to compile it yourself, and install a private copy only on your own phone…

We may finally be approaching the tipping point where Apple’s rough treatment of developers causes significant dents in app revenues. Not “huge” by any means, but perhaps “noticeable”. Apple as a company has never before experienced this – they’ve always been far too small and irrelevant in the mainstream marketplace. As a result, they could look back and say:

Why treat developers as partners? We never have before, and its never harmed us.

Sure, they’ll hate us, and rant, but at the end of the day, we’re their only source of money (we own AND CONTROL the hardware), so they’ll keep coming back

…and that’s entirely true, throughout their corporate history. And they still control the hardware (they made sure of that!) But the rules become different when you’re one of the worlds highest valued companies. Apple swims in a different sea these days…