If you are planning to develop a application for the iPhone there are certain unwritten rules that you should follow.The developer of the app’s DropCopy and CrossWalk, 10base-t came up with the idea to start publishing all these rules. Some of these rules are actually a little ridiculous. For ex: keeping the vibration on for extended periods will reject your app from the app store. The cool thing is that if you know of any rules, you can contribute to the list.
1) vibration. It is not permitted to use continuous vibration in your apps - short bursts as warnings is all that is allowed. Don’t bother trying to set up a timer to keep the vibration going, it will cause your app to be rejected.
2) linking to private frameworks. This is obvious, but somehow in playing around with stuff we had linked to the MoviePlayer.framework. That’s a no-no, and cost us about ten days while we unlinked that framework, recompiled, and then resubmitted.
3) improper handling of editing in tableview cells. Also obvious, but be aware that if you enable table cell editing, you’ll have to manually specify which cells should respond to editing controls and which should not. We had some random prefs cells in one of our early apps that were able to be swiped to bring up a ‘delete’ badge. Of course it didn’t do anything, but Apple justly considered this poor design and rejected our app.
4) icons. make sure the 57 pixel icon is identical to the 512 pixel version. Also, use a different icon if you are creating ‘lite’ and ‘pro’ versions of your app (i.e., free and paid). Using the same icon for both goes straight to … you guessed it … the bin.
The updated list and new entries can be found here.
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\\ tags: 10base-t, App Store, list, reject, undocumented features
Why is the vibration rule ridiculous? It kills the battery.
Noneof those rules seem outlandish. They are going for a consistent user interface guideline.