I was wondering if anyone has any experience of submitting location-specific apps to the Apple App store.
What I mean by location-specific is an app that only works when you are at a particular location. For example, a GPS tour of a historical battleground might have content that is triggered at particular lat/long coordinates when the user is at the actual physical location.
So my question is: In order to make the app be likely to be accepted on the app store do I..
(1) Not worry about it as there's evidence that the Apple Reviewers have some way of simulating the GPS. I can then supply lat/long coords to the reviewers so they can experience some of the content.
or (I suspect more likely)
(2) I Need to make it work anywhere in order for the reviewer to see at least some of the content (e.g. have a menu or map interface that allows direct access). This could be a 'secret' option explained in the review notes accessed via a special key combination or something.
Has anyone else run into a situation like this?
Regards,
Ben
Edit: Thanks for the responses. My app has now been accepted by Apple. Interestingly I didn't need to make the app work anywhere or add any new methods of using the app at all, they simply asked me for a video of the app in action. I made a YouTube video of the app (unlisted of course) and sent it to the reviewers.. and now it's accepted! I was very surprised that this is how it worked out!
I asked this same question (and answered it myself) a while back. I basically added a "Drop Pin" feature so the testers (and users) could pretend to be somewhere else.
I submitted an app recently that "works anywhere" (and uses GPS) but "works best" in New England when looking for data (on our server) that is near your current location. The app also supports entering a city & state or zip code to perform searches. So, in the submission, you can tell the reviewers how to test it, and we explained the nature of the app and how to test the functionality by using specific New England locations. The app was approved, for what it's worth.
Basically, when you submit an app, there is an opportunity to give the reviewers guidance. So definitely tell them what they need to know to make your app work for them, wherever they might be in the world! :-)
Related
I created an application that simply spins a picture of my goose on screen. That's it. Nothing else.
Could that be deployed to the app stores?
Context:
I'm a mobile app engineer for a few different companies (finTech, gigEconomy, social...) and all of our applications have very specific use cases for the end user.
I'm also an artist in my own time, and have built a few different apps that help people make art.
For each of these, the data gathered by the apps must be well documented and explained to the end user to be accepted by the App Store along with the purpose of that collection.
That's got me thinking, would the Apple App Store accept an app that does not collect any user data at all, but also has no true "purpose"? (Google Play Store too, though I expect their review process is so easy you can get just about anything up there anyways...)
I haven't found any relevant answers to this question online and might test it just for fun, but would love some insight by other curious developers if they have tried uploading apps just for fun
You might find the following section from the official App Store Review Guidelines useful:
4.2 Minimum Functionality
Your app should include features, content, and UI that elevate it beyond a repackaged website. If your app is not particularly useful, unique, or “app-like,” it doesn’t belong on the App Store. If your App doesn’t provide some sort of lasting entertainment value or adequate utility, it may not be accepted.
Does this include a purpose or does this mean that an app like you have suggested in your scenario gets rejected? Absolutely not.
After a quick google search, I have found the IsItMyBirthday app which lets you pick a date and it tells you if that date is today. Is this useful or unique? We could just look up the date in the calendar on the phone itself.
However, this could be considered a 'joke' and a joke has a purpose and might be considered as unique. An app that does nothing, could be considered a joke as well. It has a purpose and Apple might agree or disagree.
In my experience it can be very random on why an app gets rejected or accepted. For example one of our apps got rejected in version X for reason Y. We released a new version without changing Y and it was accepted.
I'm playing around to make an app that lets people stream cartoons that I make. It's a very simple app, one ImageView is just loading in a html-homepage in a UIWebView. Witch contain links to .mov files. So if you tap them a movie will start playing. This is because I just want to update the html-file with new cartoons every week.
Is this an "ok" way to do things code:ing-wise? Or am i obligated to us some Objective-c streaming functions?
Is there a specific file-type that i have to use in the movie-files on the server?
Is the HTML static in your app, or does it point to a server? If it's the former, you may be able to get the app approved doing it the way you suggested, depending on the reviewer. If it's the latter, you're unlikely to get it approved by apple.
They tend to frown upon web sites bundled into apps, and will tell you to simply make your website usable with the phone. See section 2.12.
My suggestion is to spend a bit more time and offer iOS users a better - and more immersive - experience than is available via the web. As I'm sure you've found, there are many built-in ways to stream movies and to present them in a manner that surpasses a web-page-like experience.
This is a problem that every developer will face when building their apps: how to contact the reviewer of your app to notify them of an update, new release, help topics, etc?
Some things I am thinking:
Include an RSS feed in your app which you can update to notify the users of the app.
Include a twitter feed regarding your app. How to go about this?
Include a way for the users to subscribe to a mailing list. This way, I can send a mass-email to the users who opted-in? Any suggestions here?
Any other ways that you think this can/should be done? Any existing solutions you can point me to will be great. Thanks in advance.
One way, for contacting a specific user who created a review of an application is to go to Zune Social (at http://social.zune.net/home) and create a new message. You can then enter the Zune Tag of the user who created a review.
Personally, I'd try to do all three - have a web page/site, with an RSS feed, and a subscription link (so they can subscribe to the RSS feed via email) and then post any updates to your twitter account as well.
You can't really force a user to do any of these, but having the options available, and linked from inside your app on the about page is probably good practise.
You could also include some kind of "Update Available" feature inside the application. Try to make this as unobtrusive as possible obviously. Obviously if they've still got the app installed they'll get an update notification from the marketplace anyway.
Sam
Besides the suggestions made by samjudson, I'll also recommend having a support-page with a direct option to send a email to you. Here's a example of a support-page from one of my applications. I've received lot of emails with suggestions for improvements, or complains about bugs. And since it's by email, it gives you the option to respond directly to people.
Another thing about reviews. Don't take them to serious. Most people only rate negatively (since humans like to complain), and by such a lot of reviews are often misinformed, outdated, or the users just been plain ignorant.
Has anyone found a way to avoid leaderbaord hacking on Game Center or at least make it more complicated?
You can see a video of HackCenter, a Cydia app that lets you submit any score you want here: Hack Center
Even though that application is not supposed to be available on the Cydia Store we've all seen scores that are obviously fake on several games on the AppStore. Unlike the score submitted on that video, the fake scores are usually ridiculously high and they discourage other players, since they can never reach the top of the leaderboard.
I haven't been able to find out how the hack is accomplished (I presume they intersect the http call and just replace the score parameter with whatever they want?).
Any insight is appreciated.
The problem stems from allowing users to generate their own score data device-side. This would be a lot harder if all the score related calculations were done server-side and then posted to the score-board (I don't know how your app works, so I can't recommend a specific technique).
I think the BEST thing you can do is record data about HOW they got the really high score for review later by you. That may be impossible depending on your game's structure. It also might be forge-able depending on your games structure. For example, some game scores are impossible to get in-game just due to the physics on how the game works. This in my opinion is your best defense against it. Sadly, that requires monitoring it all the time....
Also, even if you can verify fake scores, someone could continually forge fake scores all day long and you'll never be able to keep up with it. Someones score submission bot will win in the end. It's not human, you are. It can post fake scores all day, you can't watch for fake ones all day, you can't verify 1000s of fake submissions. Trying to verify anything that is generated user-side (such as device ID, app being installed, etc...) is pointless. It can be forged. IP addresses are meaningless too. Your app is a on a mobile platform that can get a brand new IP all they want from the cell company. Tracking single legit real users is very hard if someone wants to hide from you because of this.
Maybe you can have some kind of app purchase verification with the help of Apple too. That would make it easier for you to ban offenders. They would have to pay you to forge your leaderboard, lol.
That's just my 2 cents, I hope it helps.
Because they're doing a http intercept, there's unfortunately nothing you can do. I've even found setting the max score for the leaderboard in itunes connect has no effect.
A game I worked on never serilaised the score to disk - so it couldn't have been changed there - and set max score to 30m. Yet the leaderboard was full with IntMax scores within hours of launching.
Hopefully Apple will have some fixes coming in WDC13 because as it stands, the worldwide leaderboards are useless.
You could try checking if the user has that thing installed I guess and then disable them from entering a high score if it they have the app.
I personally would just check for Cydia:
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] canOpenURL:[NSURL URLWithString:#"cydia://"]]
I am not sure what the url for Hack Center is exactly but, maybe you could try guessing it a couple times. I would guess 'cydia://hack_center' or something like that. And then once you find the url replace it 'cydia://' with it.
Have two hi score tables:those with cydia, those without :P
You can also set up your own server and use proper authentication and encrypted channels to upload score and then just compare whats in your server vs whats in GameCenter... You still need to clean up the leaderboard, but at least you will know what to remediate and which users to put on blacklist.
I want to make an app where the users can post messages that will be displayed on a website. The users would need to create a username and password to be able to post.
The app would be like a twitter, but only be able to post through the app and read the last few posts and not be able to write private messages.
The website would function like a huge cloud of thoughts where everyone could go and read what others have written. Once the post hit the cloud, they can't be deleted. Only me could delete posts.
All posts would have different color and font size, it would look like a huge tag cloud on the website.
How do I make an app and a website like this?
David H
The tutorial application for Google Application Engine is an unstyled version of what you describe. They'll even host it for you for free (up to a non-trivial level of usage).
The tag cloud creation is not so very hard but without knowing your preferred language it is hard to point you to helpful libraries (there are plenty out there).
Getting people to use it will be the hard part.
added in response to comment:
Good luck on your endeavor. I would be surprised if you weren't able to learn everything you need to know and have a working web app by the time school starts. I found a simple stand alone web cloud creation library that explains what it does and will run on GAE. So now even that part is in place for you.
I'm tempted to make some pathetic reference to the sorts of computing that I did prior to high school, but I expect that you probably have SD data cards have more computational power than I had available to me. Kids these days! ;)