Apple has a lot of silly reasons for rejecting iPhone apps, but Twitter seems to bring out some of the best of them. A few months ago, Apple rejected the popular iPhone app Tweetie because it featured curse words in the trending topics area — something which obviously the app has no control over. Today, it appears another app has been rejected because of Twitter — only this time it looks like it was rejected because the reviewer who looked over it did so on Friday when Twitter had its scheduled maintenance.
Developer Kuan Yong, received the following letter from Apple letting him know about the rejection of his app, Tweetspotter:
Hello Kuan,
Your application, TweetSpotter, cannot be posted to the App Store at this time because it does not achieve the core functionality described in your marketing materials, or release notes. Applications must adhere to the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines as outlined in iPhone SDK Agreement section 3.3.5.
The user could not sign in with the demo account provided, please see the attached screenshot. In addition, though multiple Twitter accounts were used, the user still could not sign in. This review was conducted on iPhone 3G running iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 5.
In order for your application to be reconsidered for the App Store, please resolve this issue and upload your new binary to iTunes Connect.
Should you require more assistance with resolving this issue, Apple Developer Technical Support is available to provide direct one-on-one support for discrete code-level questions. Please be sure to include any crash logs, screenshots or steps to reproduce this issue in your request.
Young also sent the picture Apple attached, and notes that the timestamp seems to prove that Apple was testing it when Twitter was still Fail Whaling big time after its planned maintenance on Friday.
While on one hand, it’s kind of hard to blame Apple for a Twitter downtime that it’s almost for sure not paying attention to — on the other, it’s kind of lame that these app checkers only apparently check it one time during a day, and if the service it’s tied to is down, they reject it. Yong notes that the app works fine now, so no changes are needed but he’ll still have to resubmit the exact same app and wait another several days before its reviewed again.
The moral of the story I suppose is to coordinate your app approvals with Twitter (or any other service) downtime. Twitter actually was supposed to have more maintance today, but postponed it. We hear they did so because of the NASA mission that was planning to tweet today. And while they didn’t give a reschedule date, we hear it may be Wednesday. So iPhone app developers working on Twitter apps, do not let Apple review your app this Wednesday. Unless you like headaches.
everybody start following zictest3!
Ha ha yep, that is the “Apple Test Account”
Here we go, another reason to place Twitter’s CrunchBase avatar in a post.
Must be a Valley thing, over here in NYC, Twitter looks like nothing more than a RSS feed with fewer characters?
What part did I miss here.
Actually zictest3 is the account I created for Apple to test Tweetspotter (developers are required to provide test accounts). Move along now there’s nothing to see.
Absolutely agree that I should have handled the not-so-edge-case of Twitter being down more gracefully, but why oh why make me wait another 8 days to go through the approval process again? *sigh*
Love the headline, btw!
Lord have mercy on any app reviewer who doesn’t use twitter!!!
The Apple employee was right to reject this app. There is no indication of why the user name and pass wasn’t working, even if the user name and pass was correct. If it was a Fail Whale situation, then the application should have shown a Fail Whale or indicated to the user somehow that Twitter was off line.
This is exactly right – the app needs to give a better indication of *why* it failed, instead of returning a generic error.
Granted, I rather doubt the app store reviewer actually thought to check that, instead rejecting it because it wouldn’t connect, so it’s probably a case of making the right call for the wrong reason.
Agreed
So maybe he should resubmit it and hope that twitter is up during the time they’re checking his app?
I think it’s cheesy that Apple rejected the app.
BUT, I agree with Tiktaalik. A suggestion for Young might be to return a smart error message. I’m guessing if twitter was down, the API was down. If the API was down I’m pretty sure the users login information was not was not sent to the server, which means Youngs app wouldn’t have received a response from twitter. In that case call it what it is, “Twitter.com could not be reached”.
Then, next time a user has this issue they’re not blaming your app for the issue (read: flooding getsatisfaction, smearing your app on twitter (if the service is up) and DMing you for support).
So the morale of the story: apple will reject an app *if* it fails to do what the developer says it will do…so, if your app depends on an API (*any* API) and said API is down…
…wouldn’t matter if it’s Google’s API, an internal API that the developer owned or twitters.
Perhaps, instead of writing it so that people get *one too many* pieces of twatt3r coverage…you write it to cover the core, central issue:
Apple rejects iphone application due to API failure
See? I even rewrote the headline for you.
This post is a waste of text and brain cells. I’m even wasting my life commenting on this worthless post.
‘App got rejected because twitter was down’! OH MAN, CRAZZZZY!!!!! HE HAS TO RESUBMIT!!
CAN’ BELIEVE IT. TWITTER!!!!!
Note that you can’t really time your app submission with scheduled Twitter downtime. Apple does not tell you exactly when they will review an app that is submitted. I have had apps reviewed within 36 hours, and other apps not reviewed for 10 days.
As a developer, I can understand Kuan’s frustration. But one thing that might help is a more graceful exit for Twitter downtime (maintenance…why mid-day?).
For example, have the application check Twitter status on-load and display a friendly “Twitter appears to be down” message vs/ the “wrong” error saying your login/pw is invalid.
We do something similar to this when Twitter isn’t accepting our API calls…we queue the calls and notify the user that once Twitter is back online, their message will be tweated.
just a tip for iphone developers: just check the response from the server and display proper message to avoid such rejections – it is easy, for example you can code it like this:
NSString *s = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:receivedData encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding]
if ([s rangeOfString:@"Over capacity"].location != NSNotFound)
{
// here display alert
…
Wow. You’re a great coder.
this is why I am scared to make a http://www.worstpizza.com app, cause I will go through all the trouble and they will find a swear word or something and block it!
Who is checking these apps for Apple? It’s like they found total idiots.
No big deal!
Blaming the Apple tester is stupid! The guy who submitted the application should have written in the test case that Twitter service should be up and running for the application to run successfully. Simple!
TechCrunch has jumped the shark – really another worthless post when there are much more interesting stuff happening….
I won’t take much more of the …
Is this really post worthy?
Is this really comment worthy?
Are you really picture worthy?
this is f – hilarious.
ohhh, what do you know – MG still drunk on the Twatt3r. Honestly, MG, was this a needed post?
Negative.
Twitter, twitter, twitter, twitter.
I was going to reserve twittercrunch.com and redirect to you guys, but looks like MG already took it.
I think this comment rather summed it up over the weekend:
“MG is only human – May 9th, 2009 at 11:14 pm PDT
There are several recurring themes here that are surprisingly being overlooked – the twitter cycle is NOTHING new.
The first is that everyone loves being part of what is perceived “next big thing” (which MG has obviously taken hold of with Twatt3r “covering it for 2 yrs” – quite an investment). This creates bias. (find me 1 article MG has written that negatively impacts Twitter).
Now combine this passionate bias with vocal power through TechCrunch and you get 20 posts a day. This constant chatter builds brand awareness/mindshare and inevitably creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Interestingly enough, for whatever reason, humans are just as quick to tear something down they helped promote and build – enter all of TC’s nonstop rips on Facebook nowadays, pre 200M users/ we’re a staple on the net. Mark my words, once Twit has peaked, the tear down will begin.
Finally, adoption. Humans are innately born with without purpose. The internet created on a new, endless vehicle for people to occupy our time with. Twit is just the latest, most addicting thing. After “filling in our network” FB remains vibrant bc its a great stalking vehicle. Never fear Twit haters, the one thing you can count on, we are Americans and will be jaded with meaningless updates just as fast as Twit entered our lives. Then we’ll be off to the next time-sink. yay.”
http://www.tech...er-today-maybe/
So here we are, HALF-WAY into the day and here is a status report for TC licking twitter’s crack.
TC has 11 posts. 3 of them contain twitter. 2 of them specifically about twitter.
get the point arrington?
“don’t piss off the militia”
What about the name, “Phil Scales” says that MG registered TwitterCrunch.com
http://www.netw...ittercrunch.com
Look up an effing whois before you start spewing bullshit.