Thursday, November 21, 2019

SF Viewer Removed From the App Store

SFViewer:

Are you a designer or developer who wants to view, compare or export SF Symbols on your iPhone or iPad? Check out SF Viewer here.

Aaron Pearce:

Just received a phone call from Apple regarding SF Viewer. They have made the decision to remove it from sale as its concept is not acceptable under their guidelines/license.

I may look to tidy up the code base and open source it in the near future.

It was rejected due to allowing users to export symbols to various formats and view the additional internal metadata of the fonts.

Honestly I was somewhat surprised that it even passed review once so this was an outcome I was expecting eventually. It was a very grey area of the rules.

It seems like without the export feature it would still be useful and hopefully non-controversial.

Previously:

Update (2019-11-26): Geoff Hackworth:

I was sad to see SF Viewer go, but there’s another solution! Browsing system images is one (of many) features of my Adaptivity app. Supports multiple windows on iPadOS 13. I’m working on a grid view for the next release.

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As iOS devices become increasingly capable, and as Apple and tech commentators continue to push iOS as a professional platform, this sort of thing is getting really old really fast. Does Apple just not want to have powerful software on its platforms anymore?

My Adaptivity iOS app has a feature for browsing the SF Symbols / System Images: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1054670022. Version 5.5 adds a grid view (Aaron's SF Viewer app finally motivated me into adding it!) Currently 50% off for Black Friday (ends Tuesday 2nd December, 2019).

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