CloudPull Removed From the Mac App Store
John Brayton (via John Gordon):
The most significant improvement in the CloudPull 2.6 update is Yosemite compatibility. I submitted this update to the Mac App Store on October 1. Apple rejected it on October 15. I spent time from October 15 through October 27 escalating the issue — first with the App Review Team, then with the App Review Board, and finally with Apple Developer Technical Support. Meanwhile, Yosemite was released on October 16 and many customers have already migrated to the version available on my web site.
It is possible to work around Apple’s reason for rejecting the app. Instead, I have decided to distribute CloudPull exclusively through my web site. That will allow me to provide updates more quickly, and to focus on serving customers rather than dealing with the Mac App Store.
The reason for the rejection was an OS bug that causes Core Data to open a compiled model file in read-write mode when it only needs read access. The .mom file is probably inside the app’s bundle, which is not a location that apps are supposed to be writing to. Lots of developers ran into problems like this when the Mac App Store was new. Apple seems to be using DTrace to audit what submitted apps are doing, but it still hasn’t audited its own APIs to make sure that they play by the rules.
It sounds like Brayton did everything by the book, but one month after submission his app was still in limbo when he pulled the plug on the Mac App Store version. This is the sort of Max Q issue that Rich Siegel was talking about last month. The Mac App Store is supposed to make it easier for customers to keep their apps up-to-date. In this case, it instead impeded the process of delivering a Yosemite compatibility update.
