Rogue Amoeba (great products BTW) really puts forth the specifics. And gets closer to what is going on in the review process at the app store. Read their pain over here.
All these complaints (they aren’t the only ones that have seen horrid inconsistencies and nonsense) are the sorts of things that happen when scaling breaks, and breaks hard. You hire a bucket of people to get the glut moving on approvals, but many of them really aren’t sure as to the purpose or strategy of it, so they stick to the letter of the law regardless of the sensibility so they don’t lose their jobs, and hammer out procedure blindly.
The idea that it is a public API that they are using to get these images is the crux of it. Even with a knowledgeable employee going to bat, the procedure over-ruled the spirit of the policy, and the denial flew out of Apple’s walls. It should be painfully obvious to anyone with a quarter clue about Apple software development that Rogue Amoeba are doing the exactly right thing, for the right reasons, and giving the best experience with the tools openly provided by Apple.
This should have been approved. If you’re an app dev, retweet this. Blog about it. Make it obvious. Apple has been listening and changing policy and procedure, as well as reversing a number of blatant rejection mistakes when it gets loud enough. This item shows a flaw in the process that is pretty core to the experience, and Apple has actually degraded user experience with this errantly-enforced policy. Anybody that deals with Apple products knows this isn’t the outcome or user experience they want. It’s obvious Rogue Amoeba is doing it right, and the approval process is seriously broken with a very specific case to illustrate it. This can be fixed. All the facts and details are in the article.
C’mon Apple. Fix this nonsense. To the app devs that are feeling these pains, make it this specific. Make it clear the principles at stake and what you did to try to explain it to the reviewers. Then publish it and get people talking about it. We can get them to fix this mess. They want to, at some level, and getting the information put together clearly for them is the first step. Getting a lot of the other devs to crank the volume by engaging the discussion is the next step.
Losing this caliber of developer on the platform hurts the platform Apple. These are the guys that are leads on the Mac, and should be listened to on the iPhone long before the rest of us.