Come back when you have a legit gripe. Just because others get away with something is no reason you should get away with same. "Hey, officer, I saw other people speeding too and you didn't cite them, not fair!"
We were upset because it demonstrates that Apple can effectively make up reasons to block your app when none previously exist.
Moreover, it shows they clearly have no sense of humor.
In any event, it's as if you would deny them "learning". I would refer to any legal code. You can observe it change with time in order to adjust to behavior, attitudes, mores, technology, etc.
Imagine the crime boss "Hey, IRS (the US tax board), that was legal last year, how come you took away my loophole?" Now, granted, the IRS has to go thru a process to implement code changes, but this is an analogy to illustrate that codification requires change over time.
It'd be shortsighted to want to limit the change regimen from ad hoc to periodic, for your convenience.
Sense of humor; is that even germane to anything? Would it have been better if they had cited some cells from xkcd?
> We were upset because it demonstrates that Apple can effectively make up reasons to block your app when none previously exist.
Seems pretty clear to me, unless you're wanting to be pedantic about 'some form of lasting entertainment'. Their bar for this is obviously incredibly low, but you managed to shimmy under it while grinding an axe at the same time. Well done.
"Apple reserves the right to refuse..."
I'll bet there's a line in the developer agreement to that effect. A catch-all defense used at times like this. Shouldn't come as any surprise.
But I offer this thought: do you feel like you might tell your kids or grandkids that you remember a time when any of your friends could try out the software your created on their own devices? When anyone had the ability to do whatever they wanted with their devices, without having to agree to a license agreement first?
You can do this with the iPhone right now so long as "your friends" doesn't include all iOS owners.
That's just good sense. They try to set up the rules as best they can, then some joker comes up with a way to do something that isn't in line with the spirit of the platform but not explicitly forbidden (you can't think of everything). Of course I would expect them to close the loophole at that point and protect the overall environment of the site rather then say "well, this breaks everything but we're so inflexible that we can't fix rules after the fact".
I don't think the "joke" aspect has anything to do with it. We recently had a joke app published on the app store with no problems at all. In fact the first submission of the app came after the rule clarifications they did (last Sept? Oct?). Of course the humor(?) in our app doesn't revolve around ripping people off ("Ha ha...you bought our in-app purchase. Jokes on you!").
I'm actually a little sorry I clicked the original article link. It sounds like they spent two days on something with the specific purpose of getting some publicity around a rejection. Mission accomplished, I guess.