Also, they got their first version through without any issues or a peep about this rule. And only when they needed to push a codefix is when they got held up.
If you're going to have rules, they MUST be applied evenly.
Smaller subscription video or music apps could use the same section in the App Review Guidelines for "Reader" apps to have an app without in-app purchases that you buy outside the App Store.
If you're just trying to read the Guidelines as legalese then it seems to me like there's some serious ambiguity with what exactly the "Reader" section allows.
It seems like Basecamp gets a pass based on the "access to professional databases" exemption. But at what point does a service that caters to consumers AND businesses cross over that line?
The App Store Review Guidelines have been a nightmare to parse through and the Review process an inconsistent mess for many years now. IAP really took it to a whole new level.
This is one of my biggest frustrations with App Review.
It's easy to convince clients to budget for a few days exploratory work that might be rejected, but they're less inclined to do so with the possibility of an approval not being permanent, and then having to sink a lot more money into reworking that functionality at an indeterminate point in the future.
Sometimes you get stung because you're genuinely trying to slip something through that breaks the rules, but other times you get a reviewer with an axe to grind. One app I worked on was in the store for 18 months before they took issue with the way we'd implemented subscriptions. They were also not happy that there were links to Amazon, which if you clicked around for a bit, would take you to Prime Video or Amazon App Store.
While technically mentioning "other mobile platforms" is prohibited in the review guidelines, in this case it was in user-submitted content that you could only find through search.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#2.3...
>If you're going to have rules, they MUST be applied evenly.
It's also possible that it is being applied evenly, it's just that the big guys negotiated private exemptions.
... which means it's not being applied evenly.