App Rejections

Released just last week, Star Wars Trench Run [] got through submission OK – despite having a blatant image of an iPhone embedded in the game itself:

(in case it’s not clear: the whole image is a screenshot of the app itself – approx 2/3 of the screen is taken up with a bitmap of an iPhone).

Developer thoughts

This appears to have been taken directly from Apple’s iPhone Simulator, which uses a similar bitmap when testing iPhone apps. All iPhone developers are familiar with this – we see it every day.

In the early days, back when Apple let us do this (as noted in the post about Airfoil / Rogue Amoeba), a lot of developers used that bitmap in-app to depict the iPhone itself. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery – and Apple had given us all a really nice image of the iPhone. Why not use it? Presumably, Apple would be *happy* that we were making their platform look good.

(NB: for decades, media companies have given away high-quality assets for exactly that reason – to ensure that wherever their product is displayed (in applications, in magazines, on websites), it always looks extremely good)

The problem is … (again c.f. the Airfoil post) … Apple put a stop to all this, across the board, earlier this year. Just goes to show: when it’s subtle enough, sometimes you can still slip through (so long as it’s not detectable by a static analyser ).

Frankly, though, I’m surprised by this. Over the past few months, Apple has seemed to run a “zero tolerance” policy on Apple-related images. I’m not disappointed – I’d like to imagine that the human reviewer of the app noticed the “violation” but used their common sense and approved it anyway. Just … surprised that this one slipped through, given how loudly Apple has been objecting recently.