NeuroMind and OrthoRef 3.0 delayed

I am sorry to say that the final release of both NeuroMind 3.0 and OrthoRef 3.0 will be delayed. I submitted both updates before Xmas hoping they would be available at the beginning of January. Part of these updates is an Information screen that refers to the app’s homepage, and that homepage mentions that the app is available for multiple platforms (Android, Windows 8).

I got a rejection for both apps based on this rule from the App Store Review Guidelines:

3.1 – Apps or metadata that mentions the name of any other mobile platform will be rejected

In particular, the review team made this comment:

3.1 Details – We noticed that your app contains irrelevant platform information in the binary. Referencing third-party platforms in your app or its metadata is not appropriate on the App Store.

Apparently this guideline has been around for some time, but it seems that since last year there is stronger enforcement of this rule. I submitted an appeal to the review board claiming that (1) I am referring to external content that contains this “irrelevant” information and that it is not located inside the app, and (2) apps like Twitter and Facebook also show content on Android in their posts and they are allowed. The review team took my appeal seriously, but decided to stick to their decision.

I resubmitted my app removing the link to the app homepage and got another rejection. The other sections from the Information dialog referred also to parts of this website, and using the menu from the website you could get back to the app’s homepage that caused all trouble in the first place. Sigh…

So now I removed all links to my website, and created local content for these sections. Unfortunately that also means I had to remove the link to the weblog which contains information on new developments, as I do not want to create a special RSS-based reader just for these posts to avoid linking to the website. The Twitter link is still in place.

As a side note they also caught a little bug during the In App Purchase section which caused temporarily trouble with multiple purchases in the same session. That is solved now.

I resubmitted NeuroMind 3.o today and will wait for the new decision, hoping to release this month. Regarding OrthoRef, I now first wait for the decision on NeuroMind, as I get tired of repeatedly updating multiple apps and seeing them rejected for the same reason.

Will be continued….