“None shall pass!”
I have an idea for an iPhone app. More precisely, I’ve had this idea in my head for about 3 months, sitting there, thinking “that’d be neat, and hellishly fun to make… too bad you can’t do that on iPhone.” Today while talking to Chris, he told me that that thing… that I thought you couldn’t do, you can. (yay me for actually reading documentation)
The idea went from the “not happening” reservoir to the “well… ok… what other roadblocks are we going to hit?”
Next roadblock: Apple’s _so_ not letting this onto the AppStore.
Fucking. Bullshit.
OK I don’t know that for a fact, but I’d best against this app making it through the “submission and review” gauntlet.
This is ridiculous. It’s a really cool app idea. It doesn’t exist yet. Bet you tons of people would like it. But I can’t build it without taking a huge risk. I figure it’s probably 100-140 hours of work (give or take 200) to do it right. That’s a lot of time to put on the line.
But I’ve thought of an idea, and I’d love to get feedback from developers on whether or not they think this has a chance of working:
It’s not the principle idea that Apple will be against, but how I’m going about implementing it. So I could make a prototype of the app, get the basics down, try to get as much of the portion that I think will cause them to raise a flag. I could do this in… 15? Maybe 20 hours? Name it AppLemming, and send it on its way. Submit it to apple, set its release date to a month from submission date.
Apple could reject it for being too small of an app (i’d have to make it functional enough to get around this)… though considering the number of flashlights out there, that’s a bullshit reason for rejection.
Apple could reject it for the reasons I suspect (note: I don’t think I’m actually doing anything wrong here, though I might want to check with a lawyer, there MIGHT be SOME gray area).
Apple could approve it.
If they approve it, I’d kill the app, never letting it get to the AppStore. Or if there’s a way to temporarily disable it, maybe I’d do that. (though the intention would be to never let this prototype get on the appstore).
Now if they approve it, I’ve got some type of precedence, and I would have a vague idea of whether the real app would get approved or rejected on those grounds.
It’s not perfect. It could boil down to the mood of the reviewers on those days. Is it worth trying? Has anyone tried this before?
