Does anyone know if there are rules against rating your own app in the app store? I would assume that most people would give their own app a 5 star rating if there were no rules - but maybe I'm wrong. Does anyone know for sure?
Sure you are a developer, but because Apple does not allow you to purchase free copies of your app and review, you are also a paying customer. And in Apple's customer user agreement, you are entitled to review anything you purchase.
It's probably not the most ethical thing, but just be aware that if you actually write a review, people can see what other reviews you have written and put two-and-two together to figure out that it's the developer writing reviews.
Most of the crApps out there do this using 50 different iTunes accounts and it's rather deceitful IMHO, at least on that scale.
Something like that would be covered in the User Agreement which is under NDA so it might be hard to get a definite answer.
I did read of a case where an App developer was banned for making fraudulent reviews and ratings which meant his 1600+ Apps were removed. Throughout the forums there were many accusations of other developers doing the exact same thing in a smaller scale that were never banned. So in a nut shell you can get banned for it, but it could be common practice amongst some App developers, just don't get caught.
Look at it this way: Either there's a lot of ratings, and a single rating by yourself won't make a big impact, or you're the only rating, and people will look at only a single rating and not think it's representative enough.
I don't think there's any advantages that outweigh the fact that it's bad form.
Related
I am building an app for a client that will have 30 days of content for free, thereafter you are required to buy a subscription via in app store purchases.
However, I have read that you will get rejected if you have trials.
Don’t set time limits on any of the functionality of your app, either
for run times or life times. Applications that only run for a set
number of minutes per session, or that expire altogether after some
period of time, don’t recruit customers so much as leave a bad taste
in their mouths.
Finally, they also say "your app will be returned to you by the App Review Team for modification if it is found to have time limits".
This seems odd because I know the Guardian and all major newspaper apps have limited functionality.
The Guardian app is free but you get limited functionality?
The Daily app is free, but you have to pay for daily subscriptions
and has limited functionality for the period of your subscription.
The Times app is free, but is a free trial (of sorts) (plenty of
complaints about it)
There are other examples which seem to differ from Apple's policies.
Lets say you have an app that is free, but then you have to pay for subscriptions to gain access; however according to the rules this is considered limited functionality -- yet there are lots of newspaper apps that do exactly that.
I'm confused.
Can someone clarify the situation? Can apps have trials?
Thanks
It is difficult to clarify the situation because unfortunately the guidelines are not necessarily set in stone. They can and do vary on an app and publisher basis.
In the case of The Times and The Daily, both apps are produced by News Corp. It is perhaps safe to say that News Corp has a good deal more influence with Apple than a one-man development shop producing an iPhone game. Apple would be loath to admit it, but there are clear cases of popular apps on the store that don't conform to the guidelines, where they have tacitly made an exception.
So what I would say to you is this: be sensible. Don't have an app that quits automatically when your trial runs out. Think about what would be acceptable to users. It's very much a case of nothing ventured, nothing gained. Take a risk, submit your app with your limited trial, and see what happens.
With the Guardian app, we had to deliver an app where you always got at least some fresh content if you were using the free version. Subscribing opens up more content to the user.
I think, you are mixing up "content" and "functionality".
You can deliver content items (i.e. an magazine issue) for free or user has to pay for it — so the first n issues, or all issues in a certain timeframe, can be free, while the others need to be paid. But if an user purchased an content item before, you have to re-deliver it for free.
You can sell functionalities (i.e a search in the magazine's archive) as-well. But you cannot give it to the user for free for a certain time and them make him pay.
So the general rule is: What ever the user got from you — you cannot take it back from them and make them purchase it again.
There are plenty of free apps which provide limited functionality. They don't provide time limits though (or at least they shouldn't). I'm guessing it won't be as clear cut as accept or reject for Apple, because I did encounter an app which closes itself after 10 minutes, opening a web page to purchase it (closing an app is also against the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, as an app should never terminate itself).
The guidelines mention this is only allowed for specific types of content:
11.9 Apps containing content or services that expire after a limited time will be rejected, except for specific approved content (e.g. films, television programs, music, books)
11.15 Apps may only use auto-renewing subscriptions for periodicals (newspapers, magazines), business Apps (enterprise, productivity, professional creative, cloud storage), and media Apps (video, audio, voice), or the App will be rejected
I am a member of a gliding club with 150 members, and we want to have our own iPhone app. Requiring a member login, the app would be usable only by members of the club, and it would be used by an estimated 20-30 people.
Is it even possible to disribute such an app to non-jailbroken iPhones? According to my research:
It wouldn't be accepted on the App Store due to "limited audience".
Even if we were able and willing to pay $300 for the enterprise distribution model, Apple would likely not accept us as a company.
Ad hoc distribution would be fine for us except for the expiration time associated with apps distributed in the manner.
Are we at a dead end?
Thanks.
Edit: In case anyone is wondering why I didn't just ask Apple directly: I did, and their answer was, "We are unable to advise you with respect to the Apple Developer Program that best fits your needs."
I'm not 100% on your question.
But depending on your requirement, pretty much everything you need can be achieved as a web app, with the correct coding behind it i.e. CACHE MANIFEST you could make the app function similar to the a native app, available offline and can be saved to any iOS device through the browser.
Give me a shout if you need more information.
Hope it helps
Gary
You could always try to make the app a little more "global"? Perhaps offer some free stuff for Joe Bloggs to use, but tucked away you have your real motive... that way you can get it released legitimately.
I've seen some real disasters in the app store that shouldn't have made it, and I'm sure Apples screening isn't as intense as we might think. (example: that flash light application, when pressing a sequence of buttons it would enable free tethering).
Best of luck!
Yup. You seem to have all the options laid out pretty clearly, and there's no other way to do it. Except developing for android, and just distributing the application freely and without arbitrary restrictions.
Sorry.
Ad-hoc distribution would give you about 90 days expiration time, i think, whereas enterprise would give you a year. Though gaining enterprise status in the eyes of apple is easier said than done.
Even if we were able and willing to pay $300 for the enterprise distribution model, Apple would likely not accept us as a company.
You don't have to be a company to apply for the enterprise account, you just need to be an organisation with a DUNS number.
I have a question for the iPhone Development community. I am currently building my first app, and on two of my views I have some buttons. Sales and Marketing have requested that these buttons do nothing and have the title of “Feature Available in Pro Version” or have a title of an application but when touched, an UIAlertView is displayed stating “Feature Available in Pro Version”.
First off, I think this is wrong from a user interface and experience. Secondly and more importantly, I think this will cause a denial when I finish the application and send the app in to the App Store for approval. I have look into the iOS Human Interface Guidelines and really can not find whether this will be an issue or not. I would like to tell Sale and Marketing that their request is stupid and will not get the application approved and they need to stick to their jobs and quit trying to play programmer.
Any comments would be greatly appreciate.
Quoting http://developer.apple.com/news/ios/appstoretips/
Only display the UI for what your "Lite" version will do. Grayed out menu commands, "more track/car choices" you can see but not select, etc. makes your "Lite" version feel more like a commercial than a product, and an annoying and ineffective one at that.
...
It's important to follow these simple rules not only to create a better user experience, but also because your app will be returned to you by the App Review Team for modification if it is found to have time limits, incomplete functionality, or disabled functionality.
Come up with some better options for your clients. They are not trying to "play programmer", they are trying to market their product. Also, try to mitigate the risk of the app being rejected by getting it in a submittable state as soon as possible, or at least make sure that you have a plan B for the things that you suspect might fail to get approved.
It sounds like you're just looking for a stick to beat your sales and marketing team with - there are quite a few apps out there in the wild that exhibit precisely this behaviour, painful though this might be to you. (The buttons do something after all - they show a dialog.)
That said, it's hard to recommend a more pleasant alternative without knowing more about your app. (Does it have the concept of "levels" for example? If so, you could replace the buttons with a nicer "purchase the full app to unlock additional levels" style message.)
I am pretty sure this never used to be allowed. If you show user interface elements they have to be fully functional. I don't know in which document or agreement this is stated, though.
It also may not cause your app to be rejected, at least not initially. The app may be removed from the store at a later date, though.
Apple has been known to quickly reject apps for non-functional or grayed-out buttons, especially if these non-functional UI elements are just to advertise Full or Pro versions in Lite apps.
Apple has also been known to approve apps with a non-functional button or two (happened to one of my apps, got a bug report several weeks after the app had become available in the App store), but this is probably due to oversight, and not a policy that anyone should count on.
If you want an advertisement for your Pro version, make it look and act like a standard in-app advertisement, and not a misleading UI element. Serving house ads, or mostly (99%) house ads is a widely done practice.
I am in the process of releasing an application to the app-store. I recently saw that you can make your application free but have in-app purchases. When I saw this I thought that this could be used to create a free trial. However in Apple's Helpful Tips for Using In App Purchase In Free Apps it says
Don’t set time limits on any of the
functionality of your app, either for
run times or life times. Applications
that only run for a set number of
minutes per session, or that expire
altogether after some period of time,
don’t recruit customers so much as
leave a bad taste in their mouths.
I know that sometimes it's tough to know what Apple is thinking but does this mean they will not allow In-App Free Trials or that they frown upon it. Does anybody know if people have tried doing this?
As indicated in your quoted text, they will reject any app that is a "trial" in that it only works for a limited amount of time or number of uses.
If you want to remove advanced functionality and allow users to pay for them, that's perfectly acceptable. In fact, it's one of the main use cases they talk about. Just keep in mind that the free version of the app (before people pay for the advanced features) should do something useful, and it should not expire.
Also, something to watch out for is "placeholder" functionality, which will get you rejected. For example, if you make a game and have difficulty levels that must be purchased, you can't make it look like those difficulty levels can be selected and then prompt the user to pay for them once they try to select them. You can tell the user that there are missing difficulty levels and encourage them to upgrade, however, which is a subtle but important distinction.
What does it mean that I have to "apply"? Can day say: "No, we don't like your nose. Do something else!"? Did they do that in the past?
I've been investing now two full months worth about 20.000 USD on learning for iPhone programming, and I didn't apply yet...
I've never heard of them rejecting an application for developer license. But I've heard plenty of stories of them rejecting code. That's the much larger risk with Apple's stranglehold on the iPhone marketplace.
There is no reason for them not to accept you as a iPhone developer. There is no situation that I know of where they have denied the application provisioning for testing out on the iPhone. They can and will deny your app submission to the app store in some cases. Usually those cases include:
Using copyrighted assets which you do not have a license for
Competing with one of their apps (mail client was the only one I know of)
No value added (yet another "flashlight" app - pretty rare)
Opening the iPhone to scripting attack through download.
Does not conform to their UI guides
The last of these is the trickiest. A friend of mine had his app rejected because he used a UI widget in an unexpected way. This is pretty subjective IMO but they did tell him exactly why they denied it and accepted it when he fixed the issue.
Also about the 20,000, I can't agree here. In addition to learning and bettering yourself as a programmer, you are assuming that you would be paid for every off hour you spend learning - not very realistic.
Apple has a right to not accept your app at their wish, so you have to take a risk.
Yes they could. That's the risk behind developing for any tightly locked down environment.
Of course in practice they are unlikely to reject you for no reason.
And you're already taking a gigantic risk by investing $20k into iPhone development. I can't help wondering if this is a saturated market, although there have been a few well publicised success stories, everybody and his dog are now working on a bejeweled clone, and lets face it, even people who buy iphones are going to be looking a reduction in spending on pointless trivia soon with the market the way it is