App Rejections

After a blizzard of press, commentary, blogging, and reporting, Airfoil Speakers [] has been re-submitted, and re-approved on the App Store:

Following a conversation with Apple last week, we submitted this update to Airfoil Speakers Touch on Friday, and it has already been approved (in one of the shortest reviews we’ve ever seen).
…
we were contacted by Apple. They indicated that, due in part to our post, they were changing their internal policies and would allow the desired behavior and artwork to be displayed. In short, they changed their minds.

Congrats to Rogue Amoeba.

Classic Tactics: #3 Use The Press

I don’t like bringing this one up, but among the larger / more determind dev studios, this is a longstanding tactic: when your app gets rejected, get on the phone to every journalist you know, screaming “MURDER! HORROR! WE WERE REJECTED! …MOBILISE TEH INTERNETS!”. I’d argue that one of the most famous cases was the farting apps, which manipulated press attention nicely, and resubmitted (successfully) just in time to catch the wave of press interest. (”hey – that app you wrote about last week as being rejected? It’s been approved; now you can write about it AGAIN, and all your readers can get a copy and “See for themself” what the fuss was about”).

I consider that excellent marketing. Hats off to anyone that manages it.

But, even for those without skilled marketing experts, there’s a more general thing at work. High-profile complaining works. And, arguably, it’s good not just for YOU, but for everyone ELSE too, as the Rogue Amoeba case shows. Apple’s approvals-PR-supremo, Phil Shiller, name-checked them in a recent article, while talking about “changes” in the internal processes that were being made as a result of developer complaints.

Last week I spoke to another developer who got approval for an app that knowingly has a private API. They were initially rejected by Apple, but after a weekend of applying pressure on the Apple reps, they managed to get approved. Sadly, they declined to speak about this publically – there’s just a single sentence on their blog mentioning this – so I won’t be linking them or the app here (I asked them several times to share this for the benefit of other devs, but they chose not to).

But they had a lot of advice to offer along similar lines: get on the phone. Complain. Raise hell. FORCE Apple to see your point of view, and make them act on it. You’re not just doing good for yourself, you’re adding one more straw to the weight upon Apple that might eventually get them to improve their process / APIs / etc.

Of course, there’s a danger here, and this is what makes me reluctant to push people to complain. There’s 100,000 apps, and tens of thousands of developers. If every developer complains at every rejection, we’d drive Apple staff nuts, and they’ll be forced to switch to a more draconian and automated approvals system.

That *might* be better – if it were a modern, forgiving system.

But what if they go the other way – as shown by the recent introduction of static analysis, Apple is not afraid of coming down on the side of “all apps are guilty until PROVEN innocent”. And that is a worrying thought.

So. By all means, if you’ve genuinely been let down by the submission process – shout about it. But please, if you’re just trying to pull a fast one, and sneak through something you shouldn’t, hold back. You probably won’t get much press for it anyway.