Philosophy versus App Store Rejection

Por um escritor misterioso

Last updated 18 fevereiro 2025

In May 2015, philosopher William Hooper, contracted me to recreate a notes app that should pay tribute to the iOS 6 style. He saw a market for such an app, because he – and many other users – didn’t like the flat style introduced in iOS 7. I built the 1.0 version in a couple of weeks and enjoyed the challenge of skinning the UI to give it this retro style. Several thousand people downloaded the free app, and I began to believe William that a certain audience found it quite appealing. Shortly afterwards we added additional paper styles, additional fonts and a different header bar style for users to select and released it as version 1.1. Unfortunately I had made a stupid programming mistake that would cause the notes database to be deleted from time to time. We removed the 1.1.0 version from sale while working on a fix. When we submitted the 1.1.1 version containing the data loss hotfix version, the troubles began: Apple started to reject the app. After a month back and forth with the app review team, William published the following on his philosophy blog and asked me to share it with my readers. Classic Notes 2007 Banned from the App Store On May 29th Classic Notes was banned from the Apple App Store, I have spent the last few weeks trying to get it back into the app store, changing the graphics and resubmitting, but so far I have still had no luck. You can read about my adventure here. This is what being rejected by Apple looks like: That is my latest rejection, but my first looked pretty similar, and every message Apple has ever sent me looks the more or less the same, even when I write back they just send the same message, namely just a few words copied from their rule book with no sign of a human being behind the decision. They did however call me once on the telephone, and in that conversation they said they would reconsider their decision, but a week or two later they sent the same old rejection message again. The next stage for me is an appeal to the App Review Board. The file attached to the complaint, namely Screenshot_0.png, is a screenshot of Classic Notes 2007 running on the iPad. Have a look at this side by side comparison of Classic Notes and iOS6 Apple Notes running on an iPad: Here is the title bar in more detail: More images: sidebyside1, sidebyside2, iPhone5a, iPhone5b, iPhone5c, settings Of course there is a similarity between Classic Notes 2007 and Apple Notes circa 2007, but I have agued in vain to them that it’s just a fashionable likeness created by the use of brown leather, yellow lined paper, and the notify font. When I spoke to them on the telephone I explained that I can’t ditch these elements, they are heart of the nostalgia concept. You can see their complaint is: “8.3 – Apps that appear confusingly similar to an existing Apple product, interface, or advertising theme will be rejected.” Notice the words “existing Apple product” and “confusingly similar”. It does not say “Any app that appears at all similar to any Apple app or interface that has ever been made will be rejected” When I spoke to Apple on the phone I said “but the old version of notes is not an existing Apple product”. The chap on the other end of the phone laughed and said “well it does still exist it just isn’t available”. I also said “It is not confusing, nobody who downloads this thinks that it comes from Apple, they know the old notes made by Apple was preinstalled not downloaded, and they know the old notes is no longer available and instead they have to use the new notes, and they are downloading this notes app from the app store because they miss it! Thus there is no confusion is there?”. The chap on the other end of the phone went kind of cold and insisted that people might be confused and think Classic Notes 2007 is the actual old Apple product itself. I pressed the point saying several times saying “are you serious, that’s madness”, and every time he said he was indeed serious. After that I tried various other arguments. For example, I said “This is a Steve Jobs tribute app that talks about how important it is to keep the memory of loved one alive. Have you read the first line of our advertising, it runs: ‘When we love a person our heart leaps whenever we see things that remind us of our beloved, and so we call such reminders beautiful, and they bring not just joy to our lives, they also in a sense magnetize us, keeping us true to the way […]