Vote4Me: Rejected by the iPhone App Store

An iPhone app that pokes fun at our esteemed candidates for the 2008 US presidential election?  Sign me up - where can I get it?  Not from the App Store.  But I’m getting ahead of myself…

A few weeks ago, I finally had some time to work on a fun idea that I’d been toying around with.  With the craziness of election season in full swing, I thought I’d add to the madness by releasing an iPhone application called Vote4Me.

Rather than use a lot of text to explain it, I’ll just show it to you:

Good for a laugh, huh?

I submitted the completed app for Apple’s consideration on the 13th of October, and heard back on the 15th that there was going to be a delay in evaluating the application. I appreciated receiving the update, and continued to wait for two weeks, hearing back on the 30th that Vote4Me wouldn’t be accepted.

I was surprised. While I appreciate that Apple does not want objectionable content on its platform, my app is fairly tame. The candidates in Vote4Me are quoted pretty much verbatim; the typical political cartoon in the Op-Ed section of your newspaper is more controversial.

Well, perhaps it wasn’t a total write-off - after all, the app was a good way to get oriented with XCode, the SDK, etc. And hopefully other developers can learn from my experience, and heed my advice: be really conservative when interpreting the terms of the iPhone SDK agreement.

Stay tuned, I’ll share more development oriented details in future posts.