Apple App Store woes? You're in good company.
A new website, App Rejections, tracks the rejections dished out by the folks behind the Apple App Store.
It's not easy being Apple. You create a popular online marketplace – iTunes – and an accompanying App Store, which caters to the thousands of amateur developers dishing out games and widgets for the iPhone. You green-light tens of thousands of applications. You dismiss a few others. And what do you get for your troubles? A whole bunch of complainers.
People complain when the "Baby Shaker" app slips through the cracks, and they don't stop complaining until the game gets yanked off the market. They complain about an app called “Me So Holy,” which let users snap a photo of themselves, and affix it to the body of Jesus. They complain about the violence in "Zombie School" and they complain when the Google Voice app doesn't get the nod.
Even the FCC complains, demanding to know why some apps get the thumbs up, and others get the thumbs down. It's enough to make a person's head spin. Well, now there's a blog to help you keep track of all those App Store pink slips (and the ensuing chaos). The blog is called – creatively enough – App Rejections, and it's written by a gentleman named Adam.
In an early post, Adam explained some of his rationale for creating App Rejections:
There are now > 100,000 iPhone applications available on the App Store. However, Apple has a secret, undocumented, unquestionable, random process for deciding which applications to “allow” onto the deck. Ever since I started, people have cried “FOUL!” when they’ve been rejected by Apple for reasons that – in the developer’s mind – were unfair. However, in most cases, the rejections were perfectly reasonable, and/or Apple had officially warned developers “don’t do this; we won’t allow it”.
For now, App Rejections is pretty spare. But the site, which launched this month, should provide a useful window into the App Store approval and rejection process.
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