Jul 13

FastFinder – caught by Apple’s App Rating Squad

FastFinder, Uncategorized 1 Comment »

The update to FastFinder is still caught up in Apple’s approval process. It’s now facing the App Rating Squad who have rejected the update stating:

“we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store at this time because it is not appropriately rated.“

iPhone OS3.0 introduced parental controls and Apple requested developers to self-rate their applications. Apple did not seem to review those ratings, creating potential for inconsistencies and loopholes. It looks like Apple is now catching up by validating those ratings whenever reviewing the next update. So unless the reviewer agrees with your rating you won’t be able to release your update.
Unfortunately the reviewer did not seem to agree with our current 4+ rating:

“Our review indicates that the application content is not consistent with the current rating. FastFinder allows unfiltered access to the internet, where content with mature or suggestive themes can be accessed. Applications must be rated accordingly for the highest level of content that the user is able to access.“

This immediately made me think of a high-profile case a few months ago, where a newspaper aggregator application got rejected because it included ‘The Sun’ newspaper. And because that newspaper also has a page3 with some scantily clothed ladies the whole application got rejected. Rather than fight it, the developers decided to simply remove that newspaper.

I’m finding the whole thing a bit silly and inconsistent. Yes, because FastFinder has unrestricted access to all search engines, you could search for mature content as well. But that doesn’t make it a “mature” application, does it? And the silly thing is, as long as you have Safari on your iPhone, you can get to those search engines (and thus to “suggestive themes”) anyway. And I checked, even if you turn parental controls on, you can still access whatever you want through Safari. So the rating system would become pretty much useless unless every parent switches off access to Safari (which you can do in parental controls), but that completely neuters your iPhone or iPod. No kid will be happy with that.

The inconsistency comes from the fact that there are many similar apps in the Appstore that all have a 4+ rating. So Apple would have to fight every one of those applications on their next updates and pretty much force any app that has any internet access to a higher rating.
The only consolation at this point is that we’re not alone. The popular News Addict application has found itself facing the same problem. Its developer rightly states:

“Apple needs to rate apps based on what they actually contain not what they might be used for. This is the equivalent of putting 17+ ratings on TV sets because they have the potential to play R rated movies.”

We have now resubmitted the FastFinder update with a 12+ rating, let’s see if that satisfies the censors.

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Jun 30

FastFinder’s search engine wars

FastFinder 2 Comments »

Thank you for the many positive responses to the release of FastFinder. Since its launch there have been major developments in the world of search. In recent weeks two major new search engines were launched, Wolfram Alpha and Microsoft’s Bing. And both are claiming to be the next frontier in intelligent search.

Wolfram Alpha launched under a big hype, and some were already predicting the end of the Google era. The reviewer at Trusted Reviews was probably more on the ball when he commented “I suspect it is Wikipedia, not Google, which might feel the pinch…”. It seems that the interest in Wolfram has faded as quickly as the hype, so it will be interesting to see what happens next. No offense to it’s founder but I personally still don’t like the name. It’s too complex, but then again the whole search experience feels a bit nerdy. But it will have its fans, so we have included WolframAlpha in FastFinder and have grouped it under ‘encyclopedia’, just under Wikipedia.

The second big launch was Bing, Microsoft’s attempt to finally get their search offering right. Reviews have been mostly positive. Personally I’m still confused on what the homepage pictures of rustic buildings and sweeping landscapes have to do with search and I’m not convinced that ‘Bing’ is a good name either. More problematic is the fact that the ‘decision engine’ part of Bing, which is supposed to show in the ‘intelligent’ sidebars, only seems to work well in the US. But you can be sure that Microsoft will keep investigating and most people seem to agree that it’s a major leap forward from the mostly failed Live search. “Live” has now been fully replaced by Bing, so we’ve updated the logo and the links in FastFinder to reflect this.

In addition to these new arrivals and in response to customer requests, we’ve also added support for del.icio.us (now delicious.com) and digg. We are planning to keep on top of developments in the search engine world and will keep adding and updating the engines in FastFinder accordingly.

The new version of FastFinder also includes a fix for a bug that’s showing under the new 3.0 iPhone operating system. The application re-uses the same UITableView both for displaying and editing search engines. Unfortunately, OS3.0 has implemented some stricter controls around the use of TableViews, which sometimes causes FastFinder to crash when pressing the edit button. The fix will solve this.

The new release was submitted to Apple 3 weeks ago, but unfortunately it seems that FastFinder has now also got stuck in Apple’s review process. We appreciate your patience while we wait for Apple and hope the update will get approved soon.

UPDATE 1-JUL-2009: we’ve now received the dreaded email from Apple stating:

“Your application, FastFinder, is requiring unexpected additional time for review.“

Without any further explanation. We’re hoping to receive better news soon.

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Jun 24

Waiting for Apple’s approval

PhotoNote 1 Comment »
I’d heard horror stories of people getting stuck in the application cycle with Apple, but fortunately never experienced any problems. New applications were approved in 7 days (as per Apple’s SLA) and updates to applications were usually approved in about 4-5 days. That is, until now. We had submitted a minor update to PhotoNote and PhotoNote Lite. We found that the email-sending would time out on slower connections and would therefore always time out when using a first generation iPhone. So we changed the time-out parameters, snazzed up the iTunes application description and hit submit.

First, Apple came back with a comment saying “we cannot post it because it references a pre-release version of iPhone OS/SDK”. This was a “violation of Section 2.1 of the iPhone SDK Agreement”. We had indeed updated the iTunes description to state that the current email functionality was a work-around solution until email-attachments would become available as part of iPhone OS3.0. It would seem that was a very generic statement and something that was already widely known at the time. But, then again, better not argue with non-disclosure agreements, so we updated the text and let the review team know, assuming that that would be it. Unfortunately, no. Now the binaries were under dispute because they also make references to OS3.0. We scanned the binaries and there were a few code-comments along the lines of “// work-around for OS3.0″. Didn’t think they would review to that level or could even see those in the binaries, but better safe then sorry, references were removed and binaries resubmitted. That should be it then, right?

A week passed and another dreaded email from the review team at Apple.  ”…your application does not adhere to the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines”. The claim was that PhotoNote needed network connectivity when it was opened up and that we therefore needed to include a warning if the application was not connected to a network. The ‘you need to check for network connectivity’ seems to be a common complaint from the reviewers, and is usually accompanied by the suggestion to use the code from the Reachability sample program. In this case it didn’t really makes sense, as the application does not need network connectivity to function, other then when sending email. So, we kindly responded with same, and asked them to reconsider.

It started to look like we had been upgraded from regular reviewers to a “special investigations” review team. It took a week and another email came back. They had now moved on to the email functionality and concluded that here it did need network connectivity and that therefore the checking of network connectivity was still needed. The functionality was exactly the same as the previous version of PhotoNote, that passed without any problems when it was submitted. But, the reviewer had a point, there were situations where the email functionality would not notice that there was no network connectivity and they had even included screenshots to prove their point. Fine. Easy to fix and binaries were submitted the next day.

Two weeks passed with no word from the review team, so we asked for a status update. Surprisingly we got a response the same day. But the response was not good: “Unfortunately we will not be able to give you a status on your application at this point.”. That sounded a bit worrying, what else were they looking for? Fortunately later that day, we finally got the email we were looking for: “The status for the following application has changed to Ready for Sale“. It took 5 weeks to get there…

So now, finally, version 1.3.1 is out, with the increased time-outs. Also, since OS3.0 has now been released and is no longer under non-disclosure, we can officially state that we are working on including the new email-attachment functionality and will release another update soon (approval cycles permitting) that includes a more robust way of emailing your PhotoNotes.
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