Our Letter to Steve

Following yesterday’s keynote at WWDC, we reached out this morning to Apple CEO Steve Jobs with our story, in the hopes that he might personally take action to ensure that Apple plays by its own rules. Our letter follows below:

To: steve@apple.com

From: casey@megatonapps.com

Subject: Stuck in App Purgatory

Dear Steve,

We created an iPad app called “MultiTaskers”, a toolkit of widget-like functions such as a calculator, weather, timer and more.  Almost two months after our original submission, Apple has still failed to either approve or reject our app.  Even after making changes the review team told us would result in an “acceptable” app, the rug was once again pulled out from under us when they changed their mind.

We reached out to Phil Schiller, Eddy Cue and Scott Forstall personally about this but received no reply after waiting several weeks.

Steve, we are in full compliance with every written guideline that Apple has made available. On what grounds are widget-style apps being rejected, pulled, or in our case, simply being held in review purgatory?  If Apple wanted people to only use the 10-inch Calculator apps out there instead of being able to add and check the weather at the same time, then a simple statement against “widget” apps in the HIG or other guidelines would have stopped our development before we started.

We made our app in good faith, with the hope that Apple would welcome it.  We’ve spent so much time trying to make these simple tools as beautiful and self-evident as possible, and don’t believe that iPad users are best served by the 10-inch calculator and sticky note apps out there.

You said yesterday that apps are rejected for crashing, not working as advertised, or for using private APIs. We do none of these.

Please stand by the rules that Apple has the luxury of writing.  We believe that the guidelines make the App Store healthier, but when Apple rejects, pulls and fails to complete the review of apps for no particular reason, that results in a breach of trust from which all of us lose.

You can see some screenshots of our app here: http://megatonapps.com/multitaskers

You can download the letter we sent to Mr. Schiller, Mr. Cue and Mr. Forstall here: http://MegatonApps.com/AppleLetter (PDF)

Our Apple ID for the app is 365525865

Please take a moment to look into this and restore our confidence in working with Apple.  We’re not looking for 15 minutes of fame from calling Apple names.  We just want to make cool stuff for iOS devices. We want to work with you because Apple is the best of the best, but we’re simply too small to roll the dice on a platform that doesn’t play by its own rules.  

Thanks for your time,

Casey

Casey Ayers
President, MegatonApps LLC
casey@megatonapps.com
+1.904.422.2372