Halide Rejected From the App Store
The latest Halide update was rejected because, after seven years, a random reviewer decided our permission prompt wasn’t descriptive enough.
I don’t know how to explain why a camera app needs camera permissions.
If you think the reviewer was correct because “The camera will be used to take photographs” is a circular description, note that:
It took the better part of a decade for Apple to catch this.
ProCamera’s description is “Usage of the camera is needed to take photos and videos.”
Final Cut Camera’s description is “Allow camera access to record video.”
Halide may have been featured during the iPhone 16 keynote, but it seems that wasn’t enough to protect it from an over-zealous App Store reviewer.
[…]
Halide’s Sebastiaan de Wish says the company received a call from Apple informing them that this was a mistake.
Do they do any postmortems for these erroneous rejections? Why isn’t there some sort of warning to the reviewer: did you really mean to reject this app for metadata that was already accepted 100 times in a row and hasn’t changed?
Apple followed up to let us know what happened. Normally they don’t do this for camera apps, when it’s obvious why the camera is used.
So the goof was that the reviewer didn’t know it was a camera app?
My image editing app got rejected because Apple didn’t know why an image editing app needed access to photos to edit their photos…
Previously:
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It's a common refrain, but remember when the App Store was new and Steve et all warned that "running to the press won't solve any problems"? But in fact it seems like the only way!
Not sure there is a point in doing a postmortem.
Everyone knows that AppStore reviewers do not need to be Nobel Prize materials. And that their managers are probably pushing them to review more apps every day (and are probably not geniuses either). So there are no reasons to be surprised by the repetition of stories like this one and nothing can really prevent this from happening again and again.
This should be seen as a good thing instead that a well-known 3rd party developer is getting the same bad quality reviews as other less known developers. Apple always says that all developers are equal.
Definitely agree with @someone – initially this could be seen as a net positive for developers as it shows that even if you are one of the Apple anointed developers who get to appear in their keynotes and get a ton of positive exposure you will still be treated like a peon when it comes to App review.
However, then we hear that, no, not everyone is treated equally. Certain developers get personalised phone calls with an apology when a common App review mistake is made.
I'd prefer that everyone gets treated equally poorly, then perhaps some real change can occur.
