Launcher Returns to the App Store
And yet, after months of not being available on the App Store despite being originally approved in September 2014, Launcher is about to be covered (and used as an example) by the press again. Launcher has been re-approved by Apple, and it’s coming back to the App Store today with the same feature set from six months ago.
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And while in Launcher’s case the developer was told the app could never come back to the App Store, other developers had more luck after receiving press coverage and seeing a rejection reversed over the course of a few days. “You may recall that I wrote a blog post back in December where I begged Apple to publicly release the guidelines they have for widgets”, Gardner told me over email this week.
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Over the past six months, Gardner has gone through a series of back and forth with Apple’s App Review (which he covers in episode 30 of the Inquisitive podcast), and he was eventually told to resubmit Launcher because, in the months since the first rejection, the company had decided to accept that kind of app-launching functionality. It’s not unusual for Apple to loosen App Store restrictions over time, even if no clear guidelines were ever provided in the first place. “I’m wondering if they never did that because maybe they knew that they were going to revisit this decision at a later time and may reverse it”, Gardner said.
Apple’s guidelines still make no mention of Notification Center widgets. See also my post from when Launcher was rejected.
