New Apple Developer Guideline Bans Apps That Promote Other Apps | Hacker News Reader

New Apple Developer Guideline Bans Apps That Promote Other Apps

techcrunch.com

114 pointsnatesm53 comments

"Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected." <- So, sounds like the rather benign goal of keeping developers from impersonating Apple's own payment channel and thereby confusing users into believing they are transacting with Apple and then to send Apple support issues.

Apple just released the SKStoreProductViewController in iOS 6, which allows a user to access the app store from within an app (like a modal view that slides up from the bottom). In fact, the WWDC video presenting it uses cross-promotion of apps as its first example use of the view controller. If you're right about Apple's motivation, I would think using the SKStoreProductViewController would be an easy compromise for developers to take.

Edit: If you haven't seen it before, this https://www.dropbox.com/s/eytnivsz5ft43mh/iOS%20Simulator%20...

Agreed, SKStoreProductViewController is a great addition in iOS 6. Very powerful tool for developers.

I actually wish they banned all cross-app promotion, which is the second most annoying thing after the in-app purchase promotions.

Completely agree as a user. I know this would annoy developers to no end, as their scammy "Load this App and will give you 5 jewels" promotions are a pretty common way to get App store "Popularity" juice, but first, it's annoying within the context of an app, and second, it artificially boosts the popularity of a secondary app that might be complete crap.

Still waiting for the authoritative metacritic/rotten tomatoes of the app store to develop. I'm happy to spend upwards of a thousands dollars a year on the App Store - but, other than trusting podcasts/trusted bloggers, it's pretty damn hard to find anything useful on it without wasting a lot of time and money.

The practice of giving incentives to download apps has been officially banned (by Apple) for over a year, but I don't think the apple reviewers have been enforcing it uniformly.

What I wouldn't give for a X day trial period on all apps. Hell, let categorization drive the length of trial period, I don't care. Please just give me a way to "try before I buy".

Agreed. I hate "free" apps that are completely hamstrung until you buy some dumb in-app purchase.

It's a really simple choice for an app developer, you either charge up front in which case apple for the most part controls the environment where the decision to buy or not is made. Or you charge with an in app purchase in which case you control the environment in which the decision is made. You can A/B test e.t.c.

I get that, but it's still sneaky. I would like to see the AppStore/PlayStore create a third category to add to "Free" and "Paid" being "IAP"

It's to the point where in the AppStore I look to see if the top related purchase are some $4.99 coin pack or whatever and if so, I'm out.

Yes, and very annoying for my children. And for me.

Excellent point. On the iPad, my young kids can do most things easily, except deal with these advertisements. It usually exits the app, brings up Safari and they wonder what's going on. The second most annoying thing is OpenFeint - Can't this be globally turned off?

The way Apple's restrictions work, you can't build global opt outs like that. Services, for the record, would love to be able to do it; in fact, I was once begged by some companies in the analytics space (think Flurry) to build a global opt out for their products on jailbroken devices, and after contacting other companies I found out they all wanted to do it but couldn't (so I built it).

You can block kids from using in app purchases by going to Settings > General > Restrictions > In-App Purchases

That doesn't stop the app from prompting for the in-app purchases, it just prevents unwanted transactions.

Go download Talking Tom (it's "free") and see what parents complain about. Turning off purchasing doesn't stop my 2 year old from hitting one of three or four "upgrade" buttons available on screen at any given moment, bringing up a popup or opening a browser or the app store for cross promotions. I would have actually bought the damn thing because of the entertainment it provides if it weren't for refusing to support the total sleaziness of that monetization method.

Exactly - I'm actually considering going to the Kindle because it supposedly has a mode where you can determine what your children have access to.

I don't know if that will help. You can already lock down iOS pretty tightly for kids. It's the apps themselves that are the problem.

There's just a huge, annoying trend of making apps crippled or annoyware until you buy some ridiculous IAP. AFAIK, that situation is not much different on Kindle/Android.

I have personally experimented with TapJoy and even though it worked as a way of bumping my ranking for a small period of time I choose to never use it again and now that I understand those networks I would be pretty happy if they didn't exist anymore. I wouldn't want to get rid of all cross promotion though since if I really liked an app I may want to know more about other apps the developer made.

So you'd ban all the free demo versions of paid apps?

No need for having two apps clogging up the store - have just the app, and have the paid version unlocked via IAP.

This is actually really painful for both devs and users - the main thing being that recovery of the paid upgrade will be finicky and unreliable. The UI for recovering an in-app purchase is the same as the buying UI, which leads many users to mistakenly believe they are being double-charged.

Who can blame them, the UI blows.

Since devs themselves also do not get any user-specific information when an in-app purchase is sold, it becomes pretty much impossible for your support channels to verify someone actually owns what they say they own.

Until the API improves (not holding my breath, it's been like this for, what, 3 years now?) IAP-driven upgrades will hurt both users and developers.

There are API methods that directly handle recovery. However, it wasn't until recently (earlier this year) that the App Store review process finally required developers to implement the restore mechanism.

Is recovering upgrades finicky and unreliable? The only app I can think of which has the functionality is Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer [0], and it's pretty clear and seems to work quite well. The UI isn't easily confused with in-app purchases, although you do have to go to "In App Store" from the main menu. Once there, you click Recover and it just works.

[0] http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ascension-chronicle-godslayer...

> "The UI for recovering an in-app purchase is the same as the buying UI, which leads many users to mistakenly believe they are being double-charged."

This makes sense for low-price + IAP apps, but not the free + IAP model mentioned in the thread you're replying to.

Free + IAP seems fine, and it's probably been the most popular PC/Mac software sales method since the 90s.

This impacts free + IAP models also. Here's the classic use case:

1. User gets a shiny new iPhone. 2. User installs my (free) AwesomeApp on new device. 3. User is missing premium AwesomeApp features, is now confused about why. 4. User goes to IAP part of app and tries to recover the IAP/premium features, except Apple's UI here would lead user to believe they are being charged for the IAP again.

This is often followed by:

5. User contacts support and is very confused. Support cannot verify whether or not user owns the IAP, because the App Store is a black box and we get no information about purchasers.

Isn't that what the restoreCompletedTransactions api is for? It's the fault of the app developer for not using it, and forcing the user to go through the purchase flow again.

Then maybe people should be putting more effort into this setup than in goosing popularity juice and user-hostile co-promo bs.

Not sure I agree, in-app purchases have turned so scammy recently (buy 1000 fun points for $100!) that I've taken to not even looking at games if they include IAP anymore.

Institutional buyers, especially schools, usually can't do IAPs. Heck, we're lucky when they even have an app budget at all.

No, I think the idea is that there are some full blown apps that seem to serve only to push sales of other apps.

Not a big deal for demo + full version apps, but when you pay full price for an app (or download a free, non-demo app) and keep getting pushed to buy other apps it gets pretty annoying.

Some apps have done it tastefully, like Temple Run. Others like Scramble (and my assumption is all Zynga apps) just make it a drag.

Arguably, the existence of a full and demo version - along with limits on features or usage period of the demo - will be all the "promotion" you need.

No, I wouldn't. In fact, I think the try-then-buy model was actually the intended primary use of IAP.

I thought IAP was for hats for your game charaters.

Nah. All app promotion apps that are affected are ultimately sending sales to the official App Store anyway, so there's no impersonation of the payment channel.

It does affect a class of apps, including AppShopper (mine).

While that's a fair comment, the services being described here really shouldn't be affected: there is no excuse for, say, TapJoy, to mimic the App Store (and I doubt they are doing it, although I haven't seen their UI in a while)... it wouldn't even be optimal for their mission and if they or someone in a similar position is doing so they should probably look at their layout again.

However, I will then point out that the distinction you are drawing can get somewhat vague: just because you aren't accepting money, doesn't mean users aren't now confused because they think they are using the App Store's interface; as an example, they might have expectations such as trusting the validity of the reviews and ratings being shown.

Sure you can argue that. But any App Promotion App is ultimately downloaded from the App Store originally, so I'd assume it's reasonably obvious. But even so, I don't think that Apple's adding a specific clause to their App guidelines due to the very small percentage of people who are downloaded App Discovery apps and then get confused.

If I had to guess at their motivation, it would be their attempt at blocking paid-for-promotion schemes that try to game the App Store ranking systems. I think that's more likely.

Totally agreed. I tried to get that across in the interview for the article. It's pretty hard to say that the pay-for-ranking firms help users, and I think Apple's just taking a first stab at combatting them. I think there's a lot more they can do to improve the ranking algorithm in helping to combat these firms.

As a user and as a developer, I really hope these changes help move some of the blatant junk off the Top Lists.

Which prevents folks from creating a better way of finding apps. It really annoys me when I end up with an 'iPhone' type app on my iPad.

Do you have any indication of whether the likes of AppShopper will be impacted?

I could see it both ways - on one hand AppShopper is straight forward, isn't obviously attempting to impersonate the app store and adds value.

But I can also see how it could be read that it would be the sort of thing they're thinking of (though I've no idea why).

Agreed. The headline here is a bit hyperbolic.

We ran into this when I was working on App Map. http://appmap.mobi It's just one of the roadblocks against cloning the App Store or just putting a spin on what Apple is doing. It's not a big deal as long as you're doing something different.

Ironically, their new Maps app points you to a bunch of apps on the app store when you ask for transit directions.

Why is that ironic?

Ah, so Zynga will have to remove one of the rows of crap they added to Words With Friends?

Wouldn't that be considered their own apps?

Hopefully this does not effect AppShopper[1]. It is a great resource and has saved me money.

[1] http://appshopper.com/

> “The whole point of the review guidelines is that Apple wants consumers to get the very best apps from the App Store, and they recognize that if it gets filled with garbage, discovery gets even worse, and that just hurts the platform,” Satok said in an interview.

Both Apple and Google are way too late on that - they're getting proactive now that the cows have escaped and burned down the barn on the way out.

Apple should rank apps based on actual usage not downloads.

On the web we call unique users vanity metrics, and monthly active users the real deal. Why not the same for mobile?

Because I really don't want Apple tracking every time I open any app.

You seem to think they don't already track this. I don't know what Apple does, but it's trivial to hook up Google Analytics to any app you create.

I can put a network call in didFinishLaunchingwithOptions: and do that now easily.

Sounds like all app recommendation apps will be going away.

If the paranoid reading of this article is valid then this could only mean more entrenchment for big name players.

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