kosertech

Over the past months we have read about a variety of applications being denied for sale in the AppStore.  A few of them have gotten approved after some discussions with apple but there are still some that never made it to iTunes and end up either forgotten or only available on jailbroken devices.

One of the major pitfalls for a developer of the current AppStore model is you need to submit your finished application for review before you know if it’s going to be approved or not.  There are guidelines but there is always an area of unknown.  You can’t know for sure if your application will be denied due to being obscene or possibly duplicating some core iPhone functionality.

A possible solution would be a pre approval process.  This pre approval process could involve sending application mock ups and functionality descriptions to Apple for pre review prior to starting major coding on an application.  If I wanted to develop an application that might contain some questionable content I could include artwork that would be included in the application for pre approval.  Certainly the art work takes time and effort as well as application development but getting art and concepts per approved before further development was done would save many developers time and effort for those denied applications.

This probably isn’t manageable for Apple due to the backlog and time delay on the regular application approval process but perhaps they could offer it for an extra fee.  $40 for a pre approval would eliminate the bulk of submissions that wouldn’t follow through with development and submitting the application if approved.  Perhaps a 3rd party could develop a relationship with Apple to handle this process if they worked closely with Apple to reduce the load on Apple.