iPhone App Rejected? There's A Website For That

The App Store approval, or sometimes, rejection process has been a contentious subject of late. Sometimes Apple rejects an application for what seems to be draconian, or even nonsensical reasons. Sometimes they approve an app, also nonsensically. Well, if your app falls into the former, rejected category, there's a site for that.

The site is AppRejections.com, launched just days ago by UK-based iPhone developer Adam Martin. The site purports to track and catalog all the "unusual" and "unfair" rejections from the App Store.

The site will also note when a previously rejected app has bee approved, generally after some degree of publicity and protest. Ironically, the site owner himself has seen an app be rejected recently.

Here's the site's mission statement, in part:

In late 2009, things changed (I’ll write more about this later). Google cried “FOUL!” and triggered an FCC investigation of Apple and AT&T’s business practices over a rejected app. The invisible submission process changed radically shortly after – and in particular the number of truly “unfair” rejections soared.

It’s now gone from “easy” to “tricky” to avoid having your App rejected by Apple.

Since Apple point-blank refuses to document the criteria – or even to discuss the matter on anything except a case-by-case basis – I decided to collate all the known examples of rejected Apps. And so this site was born…

While Martin states that prior to the Google Voice rejection, Apple's rejections seemed to have at least some degree of rhyme or reason, I'm not so sure I agree with that. The examples I gave above, in fact, occurred before the Google Voice rejection.

At any rate, the site will still be a wealth of information of what's getting rejected from the App Store. Perhaps, if the FCC deigned to read it, it might even help get things in the App Store fixed, or at least "open."

Speaking of Google Voice, the site also notes that the Google Voice applications that use to work, and were sold prior to Apple's change in stance on Google Voice, no longer work. That's true, although there are still Google Voice applications that do work. They just require a jailbroken iPhone, and are free on the Cydia store for jailbroken devices.

Keep it up Apple; you're driving more people to jailbreak their iPhones by continuing to "wall off" your garden.