App Rejections

Apple absolutely forbids any app to take more than one photo at once. This is a very common rejection scenario, I’ve seen it dozens of times already. I’m covering it now simply because it proves that – despite recent improvements in Apple’s submisison process – they’re still auto-rejecting any app that tries this:

I sat down & made my own custom image picker by subclassing UIImagePickerController…[which] allows the user to add a virtually unlimited number of photos to the app without dismissing the image picker; at the same time, you can scroll through the images you’ve added so far.

This is – infamously – one of the most irritating and groundless reasons for rejection Apple’s had, right from the start. Essentially, Apple’s argument to date has run something like this:

1. One of our designers believes that no human is capable of seeing more than one thumbnail at once
2. He also insisted that no-one is allowed to prove him wrong
3. Shut up. I can’t hear you. My fingers are in my ears. NAH NAH NAH CAN’T HEAR YOU!

Actually, there is a reason, a really good reason.

But … from the large number of developers who get rejected over this without understanding why, it seems that Apple is *still* failing to actually explain their reasoning.

It’s all about privacy. If Apple lets developers make changes to the camera-takes-photo GUI, then an Evil Developer could make it appear to do *something else entirely*, and secretly take photos without the user realising.

Think about it. What could you do with an app that secretly recorded everything the iphone was doing all the time, and sent images to your private server? Ouch.

Due to the way Objective C works, it’s an interesting problem how Apple could safely enforce this. “Don’t EVER make ANY change to the UIImagePicker” is an easy shortcut.

One of the things expected, sooner or later, in iPhone OS 3.x is “a version if UIImagePicker that works in a sensible manner”…