One week after submitting Coathangr to Apple, we got a rejection letter.
First, our application rating did not fit their guidelines, despite following the instructions given in the ratings section of iTunes Connect. This still wasn’t much a surprise, since word has it that any application which contains user-generated content or web views would have to increase their ratings appropriately.
Also, and more importantly, Apple discovered a problem that our beta test didn’t really account for: the iPod Touch doesn’t have a camera.
See, in the post view of our app, when you tap the frame to add a photo, we show you a UIActionSheet where you can choose to either take a picture or select one from the library. On a Touch, that “Take Photo” button doesn’t do anything. Oops. Not a crash or a major bug, but it was broken, and a clear violation of Apple’s human interface guidelines. This sort of thing would probably be easier to catch if the simulator had an “emulate Touch” option, but that’s a thin excuse.
I want to be very clear about this: Apple was extremely polite and helpful. They pointed us to the docs and gave us helpful examples of how to fix the problem, and offered up developer support if we had any problems with implementing the change. After the new binary was submitted, Apple sent us a polite letter of thanks for resubmitting. It would have been nice if the person sending the emails had included their name (for that personal touch), but their directions were clearly designed to help improve our software.
I won’t comment here on the myriad App Store rejection horror stories. All I can say is that our experience, while slow and sometimes frustrating, has at least been fair.
