Thursday, November 19, 2009

My first Apple App Store Rejection

So I'm making a game for the Apple iPhone. I've made a couple of apps in the store and haven't been rejected yet. Until of course, last night. I was trying to add a quick and dirty scoreboard system to my game and was using an undocumented API to add a textfield to UIAlertView.

I read everywhere that many apps use it and Apple was allowing it, so I tried. No one posted anything about being rejected because of it. It didn't work. Apple has automated systems that automatically reject an app using the private API's. These are the methods I used:

addTextFieldWithValue:label:
textFieldAtIndex:

So if you are planning on selling your app in the app store, don't use them. I ended up building my own modal score entry view and adding it over the cocos2d window.

Anyway, it turned out the rejection was a blessing because I found out that my anti-piracy code was broken and I did an about face on a previous decision. This gave me the opportunity to fix stuff before the initial launch.

2 comments:

billy said...

Thats cool man. I never new that you could just send apple in games that you make and they would buy them from you.

Sleazy said...

Yeah, it's profitable for some, not so much me though.

Once you submit it, and they approve it, they take a ~30% cut from sales. So if I price my games at 99 cents, my proceeds in USD are 70 cents. This is the pleasure-to-use-their-infrastructure tax.