OS Version Distribution

This is the chart of the OS version distribution of the Hong Kong Weather. I think it is an useful information for iPhone Developer who targeted Hong Kong Market. The chart will be updated periodically. Enjoy~

Q. Rainfall displayed wrongly. 雨量圖錯了。
A. HKO changed their layout and data structure. 天文台轉了新的格式，圖片的連結不同了。

Q. When can we have an fixed version? 何時才會有修正的版本 ?
A. Sorry for the delay, NEW version of Hong Kong Weather is finishing the development! We will submit it to Apple in a week. 我們正在完成新版本的香港天氣，下星期就會提交給Apple。

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/

香港製造的iPhone Software越來越多，實在值得高興。只是大家似乎對一些軟件的收費有點意見。
我相信大家都明白programmer也要開飯，心機和時間是實實在在的付出了，所以收費是合情合理的。

至於售價，我個人覺得賣方有他們的想法，而他們也有權為他們的產品定價。平與貴是主觀的，當我們覺得貴，可能只是我們並不是他們的target customer罷了。

Hong Kong Weather 會否收費呢？它只會一直免費！雖然它真的用了我不少時間(我寫program太弱了~)，也要hosting和bandwidth，但即使微薄，我始終想為推廣iPhone和iPhone的用家做點事，到我沒有飯開時就找朋友幫手吧！(而且Weather還是遠遠不及收費的標準呢! )

Jeffery會否有收費的software推出呢？我還未找到值得叫大家付錢的idea呢~

不如大家告訴我你們想買什麼吧！