IPhone App in Approval Limbo for 3 Months, Dev Decides to Open Source It

Before you do this, make sure that:

1) You've got a valid complaint. I've seen too many developers complain about something being rejected when everyone who looks at the rules will instantly see that they're in violation (if you think it's a dumb rule doesn't matter, Apple made it up and Apple decides both if you're in violation and the consequenses of the violation)

2) Be aware that you're most likely burning bridges at Apple and killing any goodwill you might have with them. Calling them an evil empire just isn't the kind of thing that's likely to bring them over to your side.

I think that the OP has carefully avoided calling Apple names and such, and instead focused on the basic facts: he's spent a lot of time and effort to make the app (which has been received well by people at Apple), but there's a limit to what resources a small company can spend while waiting for a response. You'll also note that he's making sure to point out that he'd like to get back to work on it as soon as possible.

I'm sure there are exceptions, but I don't believe the kind of people who want to make significant, high-quality apps like the one Rob made are the kind of people who would so easily stoop to making a fart app.

I avoided the platform for as long as I could. During that time: the tools improved, hardware and APIs have improved greatly, provisioning hardware got a lot easier, and the review process shortened significantly.

So now, I'm dipping my toes in and embarking on a fairly significant app. However, because I'm a long-time Mac developer, much of my existing code and experience moves over without much fuss—perhaps the developers of "signifiant" apps just have a different kind of "fart app"?

Rob's situation is fairly unique, and unfortunate. The whole ordeal is a load of BS, and I hope things change for the better for him. Briefs is a great idea, and it was easily the coolest iOS product demo at C4[3].

Rob's case is special, though, because his app was never actually rejected. I suppose if he'd been willing to submit a MVP and wait the same amount of time in limbo before putting any more effort into it, he could have saved himself all that hard work. But the aggravation of not getting an answer would have still sucked.

If what you're saying were true, Apple should have fairly quickly rejected it citing the grounds you state. Something else is going on.

And isn't it the case that there are already quite a few interpreted code exceptions already in place, e.g. Lua in games?

Can you imagine the revenue stream for Apple if you could get desktop apps on iTunes?

I'm not at all concerned about it as they couldn't make it exclusive, people would run to windows... but they would still achieve a huge market share.

Maybe OS X 10.7?

HTML5 Boilerplate http://html5boilerplate.com/ is a great start for HTML5, lots of good stuff in that template.

> No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and builtin interpreter(s)...An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise.

> Briefs are eventually compiled into binary .plist files for delivery to the iPhone. But authoring uses a simple language called bs. BS is a simple language written specifically for creating briefs. Its syntax is very similar to CSS (helpful for those experienced web designers).