Unofficial blog tries to figure out Apple’s iPhone rejection policy

Is this how your iPhone will look once Apple’s taken enough of the apps off?

In the wake of Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice app for the iPhone - and with Spotify’s application hanging in the balance - there’s now a blog where would-be developers can go and look up what sort of things arouse Apple’s ire.

The Application Submission Feedback blog - actually a Tumblr blog, which is a light-touch form - simply lists the sort of things that can get you banned before you’re out of the gate.

Such as getting your “Lite” (free or cheap) version to upsell users to the fully-featured version: a Free/Lite version has to be feature-complete in itself, and can’t refer to features that the full one has. That is, you can’t have greyed-out elements in a menu suggesting you buy the grown-up version.

And “Avoid public figures and celebrities” (we usually do) - so something that morphed photos to make them look like the iconic Obama posters wasn’t allowed.

So far not mentioned is “don’t use functions that would really bug Apple and especially its network carriers” - though that seems to have been the reason behind the banning of Google Voice. More and more people are repeating the line that it was AT&T that put the kibosh on the Google Voice plan.

This, even though Google Voice is available on the BlackBerry on AT&T, as Om Malik pointed out: why would AT&T ban Google Voice on the iPhone but not the BlackBerry? He then checked with AT&T, which said “We can’t say anything and Apple is the only one who can talk about the App store.”

Mm. The murkiness of the App Store approval process - which is moving from simply murky and random to really quite disturbing - may be turning into the best piece of marketing that Google’s Android has ever had.

Update: there’s a rather scary - not for content but for implication - rough transcript of a phone call from Apple to the developer of Voicecentral which let you access Google Voice messages. Apple told it the app (which had been approved in April) was now being withdrawn because “it duplicates features of the iPhone”. To no avail did the developers point out that other apps do that too.

As they say, “there’s no app for that”. Hell, if Apple makes it hard enough maybe other handset makers really will have a choice - and even the US carrier Verizon, which aimed to preview an app store yesterday, might have a chance.

Oh, and another data point: a developer called Justin Williams says

With the latest app rejection being Google Voice, I am one step closer to selling off my iPhone products and focusing entirely on the Mac once more. I can’t help but feel that I’ve wasted the past 9 months of my life building on a platform that is so hostile and anti-developer.

Caveat censor…