Phoneys iMessage Sticker Pack
In the first high-profile iMessage App Store rejection we’ve seen, the developer of the Phoneys sticker pack says Apple has reached out with bad news: the company will pull the app in a week if it is not significantly changed. Phoneys (currently) features stickers that look like iMessage bubbles, effectively allowing users to replace messages from their friends with some funny alternative text.
The app hit #1 Top Paid in the iMessage App Store. Despite getting approved initially, Apple says that the store does not accept “prank apps” and the current form of the stickers violate Apple trademarks …
Bill was nice, but to the point. Apple’s lawyers weren’t happy that Phoneys got through the review process. The stickers couldn’t be blue or green, they couldn’t use San Francisco as the typeface, and the app could no longer be marketed as a “prank” app, because Apple doesn’t approve prank apps (even though I myself had never used the word “prank” when marketing Phoneys, others did, and I certainly understood where he was coming from). They were not going to pull the app, Bill made sure to emphasize. They’d give me a week, until next Thursday, to fundamentally change it so that the bubbles looked nothing like iMessage bubbles, instead looking something closer to “comic book cartoon bubbles”.
Update (2016-10-07): Adam Howell:
But, even though Phoneys is as dead as all those predictions that 2016 would be “the year of the bot”, the iMessage App Store is alive and thriving. And at not even 4 weeks old there’s a lot we still don’t know about it. So, I thought it’d be useful to publicly go into Phoneys’ numbers and see what they can teach us about the current state of the iMessage App Store.
