My app got rejected.
That’s how most “Apple is the Evil” posts start today. And while I do join the hordes of protesters in the meantime, my first experience with the appstore approval process was actually very good. And as such stories are kind of rare, I wanted to share what happened:
Our app “Baby’s Animal Show” is probably one of the most innocent, harmless things out there in the appverse. Toddlers like it. And so do parents. It is basically a flashcard game / slideshow featuring a full-screen tap that even youngest kids master quickly. We use flickr common creative license pictures and cartoon pictures we did in house and I can guarantee we were really careful with those designs to not make them similar to anything existing. Our first submission went without problems and we got good reviews & sales.
Four weeks later we submitted an update with two more animals and some nice additional functionality, allowing to disable animals from the show. With the thought of allowing users to adjust the game for cultural specific preferences or simply disable that one animal that Baby doesn’t like or fear. Harmless features.
Seven days into the approval process we got the “review delayed” email from Apple, which generally means something is not right.
Ten days into the process we get the email stating that we violate an existing trademark of a major player in the licensed content arena. Kind of vague. Sent email back with a request for clarification and spent a whole evening looking at each cartoon animal, trying to find out if we got too close to something trademarked. Asked ten people for their opinion and got ten different answers.
The next day we got an email with further clarification and a screenshot and it was… our start screen??
Yep. It was the title font. Our outsourcing team chose something that was not only close but an exact duplicate of the main font of that major player. At least they have a good taste. Hmm.
What can I say?
Not much, other then: Thank you, Apple, for catching that!
The point I am trying to make: Such things can happen, even in well controlled environments, even in big corps, certainly in startups. It is the typical chain of coincidences and what you typically do is to make sure it never will happen again. And move on. Which we did but I can also tell you I was damn glad that the Apple reviewer caught that. And when I look into some of those really naive posts you see sometimes in the iphone developer forums, I wonder how many lives Apple saves daily with that process of filtering out potential trademark issues before they hit the market.
Now while that is good, don’t get me wrong. I think it actually makes the bad things of the review process even look worse. Inconsistencies from trying to interpret the idea of “objectionable content” case by case, failing badly doing so. And the take-it-or-leave-it one-way communication. It is a shame how Apple allows those to ruin a concept that in itself is not necessarily a bad approach.
