Apple Is Melting Ice Cubes

I saw today on Daring Fireball that Apple is putting the Ice Cubes Mastodon app through the App Store rejection wringer. Ah, that brings back memories. The gullible Apple fanbase may guzzle down their snooty declarations of high standards and mission to protect their customer base (they use the word “safety” a lot, even when, say, telling me I have to add an online tutorial to my game), but really it’s not a crack team of app designers reviewing your app, it’s an army of beaureacrats who spend a few minutes at a time on the thousands of app submissions and updates that stream in every day.

When they reject an app, it might be for a valid reason, a personal opinion of the reviewer, an honest mistake (which they will never admit, as this is a corporation, so they’ll make you change something anyway to save face), or a poorly hidden corporate agenda, like when they started rejecting all apps (incuding updates) made with a certain middleware which apparently they decided they didn’t like, based on having “minimal functionality” (the catch-all submission rejection reason they can use for anything).

But as they were trying to get traction with the newly introduced and poorly received Apple Maps, each rejection came with the same caveat that they might let it go if I added native iOS functionality, say, I don’t know, maybe Apple Maps? And this is why early on I added Apple Maps to my Talk Dim Sum app. Because you never know.