App Rejections

Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil Speakers [] is a classic example of a common rejection reason: they used an image of a Mac … to tell the user when they were connecting to a Mac (as opposed to a Windows PC).

(using an image of an iPhone to represent … the iPhone … gets a similar rejection)

in July, Airfoil Speakers Touch was rejected, for using “Apple Logo and Apple-owned Graphic Symbols”.

Apple Logo and Apple-owned Graphic Symbols:

You may not use the Apple Logo or any other Apple-owned graphic symbol, logo, or icon on or in connection with web sites, products, packaging, manuals, promotional/advertising materials, or for any other purpose except pursuant to an express written trademark license from Apple, such as a reseller agreement.

RA have built up some good press around their specific case – it’s become a poster-child for this genre of rejections, with good reason (see below) – but it’s a pretty common rejection reason these days. For the first year or so of the App Store, this was considered “OK” by Apple – which seemed sensible: there’s no legal reason not to allow it.

Airfoil is a particularly good example of why this *seemed* a fair approach:

These computer images are provided by Mac OS X itself, using a public function expressly for this purpose.

We also show the source application’s icon – Safari in the above example. This icon also comes from a public function provided by Apple as part of Mac OS X. These functions are expressly made to enable developers to get this artwork, and use it just as we are.

We’ve done this before, in Airfoil on the Mac and Windows, when we talk to the Apple TV.

However, in the middle of this year, people started being rejected for using any image of an iphone, a mac, an Apple … for any reason at all, no matter how reasonable. As RA describes, they didn’t expect any problems – based on Apple’s own public APIs:

e.g.this week at the Brighton iPhone Creators meetup, we heard from one of the guys working on the Purple Ronnie app that they got rejected for a cartoon depiction of an “iphone-like device”. (the Purple Ronnie art-style is pretty stylised already…)

3.5 months, Apple staff want it … but still: NO

Take the 3.5 months with a pinch of salt: it’s now common practice to contact Apple as soon as you get your first rejection in a grey-area such as this, but back then RA weren’t aware of that, and went for the classic “re-submit immediatelly, and see if you get lucky with a different reviewer”.

Even so, it took a month and a half after they started talking to Apple directly, and it seems they gained some momentum internally at Apple – all to no avail:

later that day a second Apple employee phoned. He was a fan of our products, and wanted to take another crack at getting this approved the way it was. With a mixture of hope and trepidation, we provided him even more details, and awaited his reply.

In mid-October, he called again, saying that there was nothing for it. In order to ship our update, we had to stop showing both the computer images and Apple’s app icons. It didn’t matter that Apple provided us with code expressly to enable us to show these, nor that the same functionality had been previously approved. We’d reached the end of the road – if we wanted to ship this update, we had to remove the functionality.

The controversy

As I pointed out above, this is one of those cases that’s got a lot of press, including arugments and counter-arguments from other developers.

Rather than wade into it, I’ll just point out Jeff La Marche’s response, since a lot of readers will be familiar with his work (among other things, his series of posts on using OpenGl ES in iPhone is one of the best tutorials around).

…and a strong counter-counter argument, just to keep things ticking along nicely .