iPhone development woes/concerns

Developing for the iPhone is such a frustrating thing most of the time due to the seemingly subjective nature of the Apple app review team.  They’d label themselves as being objective in their review process (citing the Terms of Service agreement for reference when and wherever possible) but this is hardly the case.   Our company Matrigistics spent several months developing a few applications collectively that were shot down for different reasons.  The sad part is that the inspiration for most of the apps were…other apps that were already available in the App Store.

Apps-a-lot – shot down because applications cannot crawl the app store.  Apps-a-lot was designed to solve the app discovery problem by sending push notifications to your iPhone/iPod touch when new apps came available that fit your “profile” (learned from your ratings and browsing behavior).   In all fairness, a term is a term and while the concept should have been shot down before development were to have commenced, I was confident that the app be approved based on the existence and availability of other apps – namely, AppSniper, Bargain Bin, and AppConnect.

LiveWall – shot down due to use of celebrity images (even though the images were licensed with re-distribution rights directly from AP Images).  LiveWall intended to be a wallpaper app that took news and current events photos and made them available as wallpapers for your device.   Amongst other neat features, you’d be sent push notifications for images that came available against your specified topic interests.  While a no go, I’m baffled at how all these Michael Jackson apps slipped through the App Review team’s fingers.

A bunch of Celebrity Quizzes – shot down for the same reasons as LiveWall.  I should have learned my lesson from LiveWall’s rejection but was hopeful due to the availability of apps like dozens of Jonas Brothers Quizzes, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Rihanna.  How did these get approved?  Clearly there’s a disconnect across the app review team – or some developers just lucky on a regular basis.

All in all, the app review team is unpredictable.  Pair this issue with the fact that apps take time and cost money to build (not so much with the quizzes) and you have developers thinking twice about the distribution channel that Apple gives developers the feeling they’ll be able to take advantage of.

Android bound.