Sean and I have finally received feedback from the iPhone Developer Program regarding our app Reading 悅讀港民.
We got a REJECTION – with the most dragging and illogical (at least to us) reason.
Here’s is the reply.
“Thank you for submitting Reading 悅讀港民 to the App Store. We’ve reviewed Reading 悅讀港民 and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store at this time because it is not appropriately rated. Our review indicates that the application content is not consistent with the current rating. Reading 悅讀港民 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.
Please visit iTunes Connect to resubmit your binary and rate your application appropriately.”
Ok. They are not satisfied with our RATING. For those who may not know, developers rate their own applications at either a 4+, 9+, 12+, or 17+ levels. And these ratings, of course, give an idea to the buyers that the application should be clean, or with content mildly or “fiercely”, touching violence, offenses, sexuality or whatever that is not appropriate for children under that certain age.
We made Reading, a news reader. We rated it 4+, because when we have looked at the other news reader worldwide -
Yahoo! news – 4+
Wall Street Journal s – 4+
USA today – 4+
Reuters – 4+
Ok, to be fair, for some reasons, NY Times is rated 12+
Anyhow, now they are suggesting, we should rate Reading APPROPRIATELY before a resubmission, and that is… we actually had no idea, a 12+ maybe?
Well, we are confused. Too much blood or nudity in our news?
Btw, we see another similar story here -
http://www.pcworld.com/article/168619/app_store_rating_system.html
One last thing, we tried to be a nice good kid to react this asap. But the iTunes Connect doesn’t allow me to change that rating on the “Edit Information” page. The radio buttons are disabled.
I am using Safari 4.0.
Update : Jul 21 9:30
We emailed Apple for more information about the APPROPRIATELY rating and here is the reply.
When the user goes to tap “瀏覽原文“ in the new details page, Reading 悅讀港民 brings up browser access.
Well, all Twitter client should rated 17+.
iPhone selected the best porn provider, Google, as the default search engine of iPhone.
And the Safari actually is a 17+ application but they are so kind to bundle it.
Update : Jul 28 9:15
We got another rejection of our suggested 9+ rating. 17+ Rating resubmitted.
Related Reading by Sean : http://guruhk.wordpress.com/2009/07/18/reading-3-0-相關事宜/
