Ask HN: Was your App ever rejected or pulled from the App Store? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Was your App ever rejected or pulled from the App Store?

2 pointssk2code7 comments

If yes, then have you tried to fix the problems and resubmit it? What were the lessons learnt from this kind of an experience? In case the app was pulled - did you tried to persuade or negotiate with Apple to allow you to host your app in the store?

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My app was rejected for too little functionality. The reviewer thought I was loading a UIWebView and just pulling content into it. Never mind that that's a totally accepted practice, but I actually had everything done in native code (using TabBarController, CollectionView, TableView, NavigationController, etc).

Although I was told I could probably just resubmit it and get through with another developer I took the free advice and added more features. It's not sitting happily on my hard drive unsubmitted to the app store with 20 more hours worth of work into it.

I've had almost all of my apps rejected at least once; and in every instance is was an app update that was flagged for violating a guideline or rule it passed for on the initial release. Each time I responded with a simple "Why did this get approved the first time and now it's suddenly not ok?" type message and the updates were approved in short order.

This was one of the reasons why I stopped bothering with iOS apps. It's luck of the draw with your reviewer and the time between submitting a new binary and hoping you get someone else is irritating.

Yes. I had the first edition of a fun little game I wrote on the iPad for cats rejected for being too simplistic. Of course, it was a cat game, so it didn't need levels, menus, scores or GameCenter integration, just fish the cat could swat at.

I ended up adding all of that stuff to the game, which took way longer than coding the game logic in the first place. Because that game is just a hobby project, it took another few months for me to get everything coded, tested, and submitted to Apple again. It got approved on the second try, which was fine.

I got my app rejected (about 4 times) because the reviewer could not connect to a remote system with my app.. Each of the times I was rejected, I sent back a note spelling out how a firewall on the reviewer's network was probably blocking access to my remote system (communication is via telnet), but every single time, the only feedback I got was the same screenshot from my app with the message "unable to connect"..At this point, I have pretty much moved on.

I've had it happen once, so about 6% of all apps/updates submit to them. It was for a button in an app that dials a number, and not checking if the device was telephony enabled. Which shouldn't matter because an iPod/Pad can't dial out, but whatever. Add a line of code, resubmit, and then it was added about 4 days later.

I built and published an app for a client (a local band) - their requested features were quite minimal and Apple rejected it.

It took about 4 more major features to be added to the app before Apple accepted it.

Lesson learned, some projects might be too small to take on.

One of our apps was rejected for poor UI design. We reworked the UI a bit and we got in.

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