News:yc was rejected from the App Store | Hacker News Reader

News:yc was rejected from the App Store

newsyc.me

19 pointsnews-yc15 comments

On the other hand, there are several nice Hacker News apps for Android. Even better, if they were needlessly and rudely rejected as this app was, it would be trivial to install them anyway (except for AT&T phones). Once again, Apple shows that if you develop for iOS, you run the very real risk of your hard work being for nothing. How many apps have to get rejected before people realize this?

(There are several HN apps in the App Store.)

How about some screenshots of what your app looks like? There could be very simple changes that you need to make to get it accepted.

It looks pretty damn good. You should file an appeal tonight. They're pretty quick about responding, so shouldn't be more than a couple days at most.

Be very nice to them in your email.

Don't mention that you posted about this on Hacker News. The approval team explicitly does not like when people try publicly shame Apple for not approving someone's app. The approval process is actually not as arbitrary as is commonly believed.

In your email, explain that Hacker News is a popular technology news website and that your app is an interface for it. Do a search in iTunes for Hacker News and copy links to all of the other apps that have already been approved. That's your prior art argument.

Apple also has a policy about too many low-quality identical apps (i.e. the 1001 fart and flashlight apps). But that's not the reason your app was denied so you should be ok on that front.

Let us know how it turns out!

The homepage (linked just under the post, http://newsyc.me/) has there's a few screenshots, and there's also a slightly outdated video (http://vimeo.com/21962215) on Vimeo.

I took the liberty of downloading the source, compiling it and taking a few screenshots - see http://www.dropmocks.com/mUuib.

Looks like a clean job using stock UI controls.

As for your question in the README of whether it works on Xcode prior to v4, it works out-of-the-box on v3.2.6.

Good job!

Or you can build the project yourself, https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc/

If you're not going to be on the app store any time soon, those of us who have not chosen to pay the $99 to compile code for the devices we own might really appreciate an ipa.

I completely understand if you'd rather wait and see if you can get revenue from it before making that choice, but just know that you do have an eager and ready audience if you decide to pursue other means of distribution.

Your app does look like a step up from vanilla form field entry in mobile safari. It is about as basic an app as one can make, though. After reading your reference to Flipboard I was expecting an innovative user experience, though. Instead it's widgets straight off the palette in IB, but orange.

Have you considered something more ambitious on the UI front?

Ugh. I have it with ambitious apps. The app store needs so many more perfect standard apps. Custom controls are easy to get wrong. You have to be a genius to do an ok job with custom controls and most aren't.

This looks like a HN app I would actually like to use (as opposed to all the others currently in the App Store). Looks can be deceiving, though, the app might not be to my liking in some subtle way.

Yes, please appeal.

I use one of the existing (paid) HN apps, it has less functionality than yours, and, bonus, yours includes source code, so if something annoys me I can fix it myself.

I started writing my own, but now that seems kind of redundant :)

Maybe you could contact PG and see if he'd be willing to partner with you on it? Then it becomes an "official" app rather than an aggregator. Best of luck either way.

How do you use telekinesis?

For those who downvoted, look at https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc/blob/master/CREDITS. It lists telekinesis by Nicholas Jitkoff (who wrote Quicksilver). It wasn't clear to me how he's using it in the code.

Ah, okay, that makes sense. I only use a tiny part of it, just a category for URL parameter parsing (it was the best one I could find online and the license worked out fine): https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc/blob/master/Classes/Categor...

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