Ask HN: What to do about our latest App store rejection?
1 comments
f) use different pictures...I dunno, kittens with ribbons or clowns or something.
I'm not fundamentally opposed to a game involving bikini-clad girls, and it's true enough there are other apps out there with more overtly sexual themes. And I get that it's basically a simple game you're trying to spice up with some eye candy, and girls in bikinis are a popular form of eye candy. It sure seems like approval or disapproval is arbitrary and changes with the weather.
On the other hand, how hard can it be to try out some alternative content? Just because it's simple doesn't mean it's not worth selling. Maybe the market for kids' games is underserved (using the examples I gave above). Hell, try it with hunks in Speedos and whether the ladies would like some silly fun.
I'm not fundamentally opposed to a game involving bikini-clad girls, and it's true enough there are other apps out there with more overtly sexual themes. And I get that it's basically a simple game you're trying to spice up with some eye candy, and girls in bikinis are a popular form of eye candy. It sure seems like approval or disapproval is arbitrary and changes with the weather.
On the other hand, how hard can it be to try out some alternative content? Just because it's simple doesn't mean it's not worth selling. Maybe the market for kids' games is underserved (using the examples I gave above). Hell, try it with hunks in Speedos and whether the ladies would like some silly fun.
Background:
As a project to learn Objective-c we decided to remake an old flash game we'd made several years ago that had been popular at the time. The game is basically "simon" (remember the flashing lights sequence) but tapping CGI bikini covered women on their behinds, in the memorised order. As you go through the game you win various awards which are represented as playing cards with photos of women in bikinis on them.
We've been rejected for several reasons over the last 5 months, some of which were without ANY given reason, others for reasons where one may disagree with them but you can at least see where they are coming from. (e.g. tapping women was considered violence aginst women, so we changed it to a feather tickling them, which was also considered derogatory - we now have a set of drums in front of each and they just dance to specific "beats")
Having gone through all of these rejections including one reviewer who called us and told us that if we changed it from the feather tickling to drums then we would almost certainly get approved, we have now been rejected again. This time because one or some of the award cards can be seen as "objectionable content".
The images we use are all PG13 at the absolute worst, but we've rated the app at 17+ in the app store. As usual there are apps already out there with far worse images but that isn't really an argument we can put to anyone.
An email back to the review team asking which cards were considered objectionable was met with a copy and paste from the T&Cs (Section 3.3.14).
As this project was a learning experience that has led on to other work and projects it's not been a complete loss and we never expected to get rich from it, but it has been a frustrating experience (one we've not had with our other apps, all of which are non-adult themed.)
We're staying positive and looking at the options Do we:
a) keep trying to appease the different reviewers we get assigned who have different levels of judgement. We feel like we are working in the dark though.
b) just take out all the awards, leaving a game that TBH isn't unique and certainly not worth selling
c) try selling via a jailbreak site such as cydia, might this harm our relationship with Apple down the line?
d) Put large semi-sarcastic "censored" text over each image and release it as a free game?
e) Not waste any time on it and ditch it?
f) something else?
Thanks for any input