4th Time's a Charm - How We Got Through the iPhone App Store's Reject-o-matic
As everyone knows by now, iPhone app approval is a fickle beast. While Apple's recently made efforts to improve transparency, and the numbers look promising on their face - 95% of all apps submitted eventually get approved! - there's still pitfall after pitfall in the way of getting an app into iPhone user hands. We learned this firsthand through our submission, rejection, re-submission, re-rejection, re-re-submission, re-re-rejection, re-re-re-submission, and final, glorious approval (phew!) of our inaugural app - zing!. When we built zing!, we thought we were clever. We thought hard about each screen, button, interaction and sound that went into our first foray into iPhone apps. We didn't expect our cleverness to bite us in the ass. Lesson learned: don't try to be cute with the iPhone app gods. They are not amused.
In our initial zing! submission, on the Default screen, we used Dick Cheney's face, thinking he was the apotheosis of all that's sinister and the perfect representation to trigger our Evil Laugh effect.
8 days after submission, Apple emailed us with a screen shot of Darth Cheney informing us they rejected our app because it ridicules a public figure. Guess you can't get anything past them, nosirreebob.
So we happily changed the icon to the Evil Clown. (psst, that's our beautiful designer hiding underneath that photoshop job. Thankfully, she's not Vice President... yet.) Round two: we received a call from an App Store (app)rover - a nice touch to keep our hopes up, even though the gist of the call was that they found two more reasons to keep us out of the App Store. And by "more" I mean "silly." zing! is a soundbox app. You push a button and a sound effect plays. Keychains sold in Claire's and prizes in claw-grabber arcade games do the same thing. So we figured, 4+ crowd, no problem. Apple had a different idea - suggesting to us that the sound of creaky bedsprings (zing! Human theme screen, pr0n button) was too racy for the ears of the littl'uns, and suggested we try for 17+. I guess you can never be too careful of lascivious sound effects... We overshot the mark though, because in a later update, we lowered the age requirement to 12+, and it sailed right on through to re-approval. Our jokester nature got us reason number 3 we weren't getting any play in the App Store. For the Fail effect on the Robot screen we originally created an iPhone Blue S creen of Death with a sound that emulated the Windows BSOD failure we all know and love.
But the joke was on us, actually. Protip: No app may suggest failure of the iPhone hardware (see: the app that took a screen shot of the home screen and displayed cracks). Apple thinks this might confuse iPhone users less savvy than you and I. Ok, fine. Take out humor, insert Epic Fail, re-re-submit.
But who had the Epic Fail IRL? That's right, we did - rejected once again, even though we'd cleared our idea with the nice Apple employee on the phone. Apparently, features acceptable to one approver may not be acceptable to another. The Epic Fail wasn't clear enough of a joke to some higher power, and we had to completely change our Robot Fail effect to the familiar sounding, but having nothing to do with any recognizable classic sci-fi space opera for which we may be sued, robot-shot-by-a-laser sound that you enjoy today! After jumping through all those hoops, though, Apple finally gave us the thumbs up and we debuted our app to the world last month. Worth the wait? Sure. But hopefully our experience can help shed some light as you make your way down the dark and winding road that is the App Store approval process. In return, maybe you'd care to take a minute and 99 measly cents to check out what we've put together! In sum:
1. Don't ridicule public figures in any way - look at the Obama Hope app.
2. Do NOT suggest or imitate a hardware malfunction, because you KNOW how much Apple hates it when someone does something that can confuse their users (unless, of course, you're a celebrity).
3. Rate your app 17+ for anything remotely suggesting <whisper> S-E-X</whisper>.
