Why Apple Nixed My iPhone App

This is a terrible, unilateral, knee-jerk methodology to determine application eligibility. It seems that apple is constantly creating lose/lose situations in which the developers have zero recourse for their strongly legitimate complaints.

The real issue is that there is no discussion happening between Apple's AppStore approval staff and the developers. If there was 2-way communication between the two the developer would know fairly quickly whether or not this was Apple having an over-reachingly broad policy, or just an Apple employee misinterpreting the policy.

I think that Apple is running into the same problem that the patent office has. Everybody can't be an expert on everything, and it's increasingly expensive to hire experts to do mind-numbingly boring work like shuffling through applications (software or patent) to approve based on rather broad criteria. Not only that, but there is pressure to just push things through the pipeline (whether they are approved or rejected).

In this case, it's entirely possible that the employee that rejected the app knows there is a program called Bitwise, and thought that this app was trying to tag along on that popularity (I guess?) not realizing that bitwise is a generic term. It might be a different story if he was naming his app Bitwise, vs just adding it as a search keyword.

But all of this could be solved through 2-way communication and making AppStore developers feel like valued business partners -- they are business partners with Apple afterall. Even the US Patent Office -- for all its ills -- has an amount of communication between the patent reviewer and the patent applicant.

If the AppStore reviewer fired off an email or phone call to the developer saying, "Your app seems great, but we don't like the keyword 'bitwise' in there because it's referring to another application," the developer could immediately respond with, "But 'bitwise' is a generic term that describes the functionality of my app. Wikipedia/Google it."

As it stands, the developer feels like Apple is talking down to him/her from 'on high,' decreeing that this app does not seem worthy of the AppStore. Without communication, the developer feels powerless to affect the outcome of the approval process, and gets frustrated at minor details like this which would probably be cleared up over a couple of emails instead of forcing the developer to resubmit his app in the 'Apple approved way' (even though his way might be perfectly fine, and the reviewer was only mistaken).

As far as I can see, one of the problems with this gatekeeper thing, is that it doesn't scale very well - you can't do a proper job of talking to each developer and making a fully informed decision in each and every case - they just don't have the time. So they've got a default 'No soup for you' policy if there are any questions about an app. Given that they apparently aren't short of new app's in the pipeline, then from their point of view, saying no to a few hundred won't make much difference to the platform overall.

Does anybody else feel like there's just been a rash of this kind of stuff lately? Apple really seems to be dropping the ball on a number of issues. Whether it's the attempted trademarking of "glossy chat bubbles", lethargic update cycles, or app rejection decisions like the one in this article, I really feel like the Apple user and developer experience has soured. I think the iPhone store (and the iPhone phenomenon) is perilously close to jumping the shark.

Android, anyone?

Because business doesn't work like that. You can't go around changing someone application, or removing words from the description that you don't like. That is really bad. They have given the guy the option to resubmit, so all that happens is his app is a couple of weeks late.