iUI app rejected by App Store

[markdionne]

My iUI-based app was just rejected by the App Store. Here is the
reason they gave:

We've reviewed your application, [name deleted]. The submitted iPhone
application is a web clipping. The functionality of the submitted
binary currently exists on the iPhone. A user can navigate to the
webapp in Safari, select the "+" button, and select the option "Add To
Home Screen".

The binary that I submitted works by launching Safari with the app's
URL and passes as arguments the phone's serial number and a hash code
based on the SN. The app uses these arguments like username/password
to log in to the account, or to create the account the first time the
app is launched.

I could have loaded the URL directly into the application the way
PhoneGap does. Doing it that way is less versatile, since it requires
the app to reload from the server, which will fail if the net is not
reachable. Having the app in one of the eight Safari pages means that
it can stay active even when the net is not available.

I'll try again using PhoneGap.

This is actually the second time Apple rejected it. The first time
they merely said the application had "minimal functionality."

[pcm]

On Feb 2, 5:29 pm, markdionne <markdio...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> We've reviewed your application, [name deleted].  The submitted iPhone
> application is a web clipping. The functionality of the submitted
> binary currently exists on the iPhone.  A user can navigate to the
> webapp in Safari, select the "+" button, and select the option "Add To
> Home Screen".
>

> I'll try again using PhoneGap.

Apple is also rejecting PhoneGap apps, at least those that are mostly/
all web-style HTML and JavaScript.

Perhaps by integrating more deeply with the accelerometer, microphone,
and speakers, it will surpass "web-clipping" status. Or perhaps all
the HTML has to be ported to Objective-C.

It's unclear, of course, why "web clipping" apps are rejected, when
there are many ports of websites (Twitter, Amazon) approved by the App
Store.

[mjvillarejo]

Hello, I won't be much useful, but how can I submit an application to
app store?

Thanks
MV

[ade]

mjvillarejo wrote:

Hello, I won't be much useful, but how can I submit an application to
app store?
  

access the upload section through the developer portal

--
ade
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[shelly]

Well in a few weeks I'm going to submit my app, I think apple will be
hardpressed to consider it a webclipping app. I would say 50% of the
code is web dependent and the other 50 objective c. Without giving to
much away, because I'm also doing a position paper for possible
submission to Javaone. It uses a lot of phone features including
location and gps. It uses a backend server written in java to display
images from x number of upnp or bonjoir servers on your network.

It doesn't use iui or phoneGap, It uses a combination of a java
framework called icefaces tightly integrated with dashcode for the web
portion. It uses a server push technology. Clicking on the web tab
opens 1-x uiwebviews, each webview represents an independent session.
The backend uses the icefaces equivalent of comet-d to allow all the
session to "talk" to each other. That is changing a value in one
session directly affects all the other sessions. Lets say you had a
geocaching application (which is something else I am working on) and
the iphone ui has 4 open scaleable windows to your web application.
Than each window could have a different user view of the map, say as a
scatterPlot, a hyperbolic tree and an actual map showing gelogical
data. Lets say you wanted to do gecaching, than using the location and
gps functions on the phone the web application could update each of
the 4 independent views realtime. Once more as your location changes
the application could update all users who are connected to that
application as well. At the same time they can open a chat window and
talk with each other.

Meantime the same data can be pushed to a static html location on the
phone. (yes this is possible) which can be checked perodically via
objective-c, this static info can then be accessed via a
NSURLRequest , thus updating both gps info and the selection pick
boxes on the screen.

By my count to try to do this with safari would require 4 browser
windows simultaneously pointing at the same location, but the app
needs to know the session ids for this to work something your not
going to be able to do with safari alone.

This is just a quick capsule of the functionality, If apple calls this
a web clipping app than they need to hire testers who actually know
something about networking applications.

Also most of the above is impossible to do with phonegap or iui.

So I guess we will just see how many times it gets rejected . One
interesting point, if apple actually deploys a kind of multitasking
than you could write multiple linked applications connecting to the
same browser session. This can already be done on other platforms that
support icefaces like opera 9 running on windows mobile devices. Of
course the only phone that can support all the functionality of this
app is an iphone and possibly a blackberry.

About the above, not all the details have been worked out, so you may
find flaws, but I've tested individual proof of concepts of most of
the techniques

[markdionne]

You mention that Apple is rejecting PhoneGap Apps. One of them was me!
There was a big discussion about this on the PhoneGap forum.

Do you know of another PhoneGap app that was rejected?

I don't even know what a "web-clipping" is, but I don't think my app
could be called that. It has a complicated UI.

In any event, my app was finally accepted by Apple last weekend. It is
called CalorieMinder and it's a nutrition and exercise logger at
$3.99. It seems to be getting a reasonable amount of sales.

I ended up using a simplified version of PhoneGap with the API calls
removed that I did not need. Apple's reason for rejection claimed that
using PhoneGap amounted to using undocumented APIs, but they would not
tell me which APIs were the culprets.

[kurtofcmr]

I am a scientific instrument manufacturer who would like to put a
local website onto the iPhone so as to be able to distribute an app
with embedded training content for our instrument. I am very concerned
about the way that Apple seems to be throwing out quite legitimate
apps built in Phonegap - it seems that their Appstore testers either
don't know what they are doing or are exercising excessive
preciousness about what applications are to be allowed onto their
distribution mechanism.

I have one question - if we use the AdHoc distribution method, or
upgrade to the Enterprise level of developer, can we avoid the whole
Appstore checking process and distribute precisely what we would like
to our specific, small number <100, customers. I am just not prepared
to dedicate significant effort to getting this whole thing up and
running if Apple reserve the right to prevent me from doing a simple
thing that their embedded Safari browser cannot do reliably (like
getting <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes"> to
run properly so that links do not open up new safari windows.)

Thanks

Kurt

[Michael Kaye]

Kurt,

> I have one question - if we use the AdHoc distribution method, or
> upgrade to the Enterprise level of developer, can we avoid the whole
> Appstore checking process and distribute precisely what we would like
> to our specific, small number <100, customers. I am just not prepared
> to dedicate significant effort to getting this whole thing up and
> running if Apple reserve the right to prevent me from doing a simple
> thing that their embedded Safari browser cannot do reliably (like
> getting <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes"> to
> run properly so that links do not open up new safari windows.)

Yes this is precisely what the Ad Hoc distribution is for...you create
your Ad Hoc certificate (tied to the UUID of the phones, create your
app and send it with the certificate to the user. They then drag both
onto iTunes and then sync with their phone.

Process is simple except getting all the UUID for the phones you want
to distribute to, but once its done, it done!

BTW Enterprise is for companies with 200+ employees so just use the
standard membership to distribute Ad Hoc apps to up to 100 people.

Hope this helps, M.

[kurtofcmr]

Michael

thanks for the response. I am concerned that Apple may decide at some
point in the future that Ad hoc is only for beta testing and that it
is not possible to retain one's applications distributed as Ad Hoc
permanently. If this was the case then this would undermine our whole
approach. It would be especially annoying if at that point they then
decided that as we are a company of less than 200 people we cannot
also qualify for Enterprise status. Does anyone know if the service
for enterprise is actually any different to using the Ad Hoc
distribution method, or is it just a fairer price for big companies to
pay. If there is any difference then does anyone know if it is
possible to avoid the 200 employee requirement, as this seems rather
unfair on small innovative companies, such as ours.

regards

Kurt

[∞ (infinite labs)]

On Mar 26, 4:50 am, kurtofcmr <k...@cmr.uk.com> wrote:
> Michael
>
> thanks for the response. I am concerned that Apple may decide at some
> point in the future that Ad hoc is only for beta testing and that it

[snip]

Um, the Agreement makes it pretty clear that Ad Hoc is NOT for
distributing applications to internal clients. If you're doing that
and Apple catches you, they can revoke your privileges by the
Agreement's terms.

- ∞