2 Rejections and 42 Days of Waiting
Last week we received an e-mail from Apple’s App review team notifying us that after 14 days of review, our latest update to iCombat Lite would not be accepted because of “inappropriate keywords.” The offending keyword was “wii tank,” and we had chosen this because many of our users have told us that our game reminded them of the tank mini game that is part of Wii Play.
While we knew not to use current iPhone app names as keywords, it had never in a million years occurred to us that “wii” might be problematic. In Apple’s words, they “cannot post applications that contain irrelevant keywords in their search criteria” and suggested that “it would be appropriate to remove ‘wii tank.’” Interesting since they: 1) had already approved our iCombat paid version with the same keyword, 2) have approved an app with Wii in the title, and 3) they had already rejected iCombat Lite two weeks prior for some other reason without mentioning any problems with the keywords.
What is so frustrating about this latest round of trivial rejections is that the app review “feedback” seems to always come on day 14 (at the earliest), and happens serially. To give you an idea, we first submitted iCombat Lite update 1.1 on September 8th, 41 days ago! After being rejected for an issue Apple reported with the code on September 22nd, and spending several days working on replicating the bug (which we never even managed to), we resubmitted the exact same keywords and code on September 28th.
On October 12th (14 days later) we received notice that the entire update would need to be resubmitted because of the “wii tank” keyword. Had anything changed from the approved iCombat Paid version or the previously rejected lite version? Nothing at all…and so we deleted the words, resubmitted and for the third time started another 14 day approval cycle. All in all, if we are lucky we expect the iCombat Lite update to be approved on October 26th, just 48 days to get to market (42 if we subtract the days we took to work on the first rejection).
Reasons to Avoid Developing for the iPhone
Ignoring how illogical this last keyword rejection has been, the real damage of the current app approval process is that it has created a slow and arbitrary development environment that does nothing but discourage indie developers. The biggest issues with this setup are:
- Slower development cycles – As if figuring out what users wanted wasn’t hard enough, now add a 14 day approval delay which quickly turns into 1 month with any rejection and you have a buffer that really starts to isolate developers from their users and this constrains the feedback – iteration loop
- Product/ Market fit is replaced with Product/ Apple fit – To use Andreesen’s advice (worth a read), entrepreneurs should “do whatever is required to achieve product/ market fit.” Here the only thing that matters is finding what users want and giving it to them. Yet with Apple as the gatekeeper success is not determined by the market but first by whether Apple will LET you play in its garden. This perverts the goals of the developer and ultimately reduces the chances that an efficient product/ market fit can occur. You could even argue that on the off chance that you find an exceptional product/ market fit you are at even a higher risk of being cannibalized or pulled or copied by Apple itself.
- Impossible ROI calculations – If you are trying to run a business based off of App development, how can you possibly calculate the return on your investment when you have no control over your launch to market? Unless you are ngmoco with funding from Kleiner Perkins then how can you build a business on top of such uncertainty (market and execution risks should be more than enough to contend with without having to worry about the d-bag app reviewer risk)
- App approval amnesia and the lack of a fast track system – What seems to be happening all too often is that previously approved apps, after waiting weeks in the queue, get rejected for features that had already been approved in past releases. This approval amnesia combined with being lumped in with new app approvals creates a developer disincentive to work on refining applications. Does it make sense when iCombat Lite, having been live for 3 months with 100k installs and no complaints, suffers a 40+ day delay because it is being forced to the back of the line over and over again to wait amongst what is new crapware? The sooner these apps can get updates out the sooner they can deliver high quality experiences to Apple users.
All of these factors serve to undermine developer confidence, reduce the quality of apps in the store, and ultimately choke app development activity. Developers are already looking to other platforms and are limiting investment as the environment has simply become too unpredictable to work with. Sure Apple has its reasons, namely pushing its 85k or 100k or 250k apps commercials to prove it has the most evolved app ecosystem versus its peers. But if Apple doesn’t fix these problems soon, those numbers will begin to mean less and less, and at some point the number of apps in the App store will be about as meaningful as the number of videos uploaded to YouTube.
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