Getting your app accepted in the apple app store

Q: How do I get my app approved for the Apple App store.
A: Easy, just follow the guidelines.

Ok, so obviously it’s harder than it sounds. There are more than one hundred official reasons why your app may be rejected. On the other hand, it’s very similar to Google’s PageRank guidelines, which have been very transparent in the past: just follow the rules and everything will turn out fine.

1. Follow the guidelines
2. Submit your app for review

Getting your app approved can be tricky. Opentracker can assist you in this process. We can show you:

1. what device Apple used to check your app, for example, an iphone or an ipad
2. what OS version Apple used to test your app
3. how many and which specific events (swipe, button pressed, etc.) Apple generated to test your app

This information can help you gain insight into the app approval process, specifically regarding how your app is tested, increasing your chances of success.

The process can be frustrating and time-consuming, especially as a lot of the guidelines are meta-points that you should probably take into account in the initial stages of conceiving your app. If you would like to see the guidelines yourself, you will first need to register yourself as an Apple Developer.

Here are a few sample causes for rejection taken from the Functionality section:

• Apps that crash will be rejected
• Apps that exhibit bugs will be rejected
• Apps that browse the web must use the iOS WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript
• Location data can only be used when directly relevant to the features and services provided by the app to the user or to support approved advertising uses
• iPhone apps must also run on iPad without modification, at iPhone resolution, and at 2X iPhone 3GS resolution

Regarding this last point, we have a case study. In this example, the app was submitted for review and rejected.
Here is the event-stream of the engineer at Apple who reviewed the app:

In our case study, the app maker submitted an app which was built for iphone and was rejected because it was not compatible for ipad.

By reviewing the clickstream, the app-maker is able to see that Apple tested the app only once, and only on an ipad. It is also possible to see that the platform/ OS was 5.1.1 and that the engineer generated an event stream with 10 events, including 6 buttons pressed.

So, our app-maker can now benefit by getting an idea of how testing is done; how much time is used, how long before testing occurs after the notification email from apple, and crucially, which specific functionality is tested.

And most importantly, using this insight, the app-maker can test on the correct device and OS in order to ensure everything is working and that the apple tester’s events can be duplicated, for trouble-shooting purposes.