{"id":27514,"date":"2019-12-09T16:50:50","date_gmt":"2019-12-09T21:50:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=27514"},"modified":"2022-05-09T14:52:25","modified_gmt":"2022-05-09T18:52:25","slug":"the-informations-app-store-ordeal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2019\/12\/09\/the-informations-app-store-ordeal\/","title":{"rendered":"The Information&rsquo;s App Store Ordeal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theinformation.com\/articles\/inside-our-apple-app-store-ordeal\">Jessica Lessin<\/a> (<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Jessicalessin\/status\/1203343569383297025\">tweet<\/a>):<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/www.theinformation.com\/articles\/inside-our-apple-app-store-ordeal\">\n<p>The last two weeks have been a crash course in Apple&rsquo;s gatekeeper status over consumers&rsquo; digital lives. Apple rejected our app four times. Some of the pushback we received was so specific&mdash;such as not being allowed to underline the words &ldquo;free trial&rdquo;&mdash;I was stunned. Other requirements seemed arbitrary, such as the rule that we couldn&rsquo;t require users to enter their email (while Disney and the New York Times could).<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>The copy we submitted read &ldquo;Annual + 7 day free trial, $29.99.&rdquo; The reviewer told us it wasn&rsquo;t clear that you would be billed after 7 days.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>If we wanted to launch, we had to disable a part of the app that allowed Tech Top 10 users to preview The Information articles and subscribe to read them.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Next, our app reviewer had also determined that some of the news briefs in the app were available for free on our website, which wasn&rsquo;t allowed.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>This time their objections related to our About Page, among other things. It couldn&rsquo;t mention our website because our website is a link and that link might eventually take someone to a page where they could subscribe to The Information (similar to the article issue).<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Our Android app launched Wednesday as well. All that took was a push of the button and a short waiting period. But so far, 86% of our usage is coming from iPhones.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/rjonesy\/status\/1203461751012052992\">Ryan Jones<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/rjonesy\/status\/1203461751012052992\">\n<p>You didn&rsquo;t hit on the fact that they revealed rejection issues 1-by-1, wasting days and days, instead of listing multiple issues at once. <\/p>\n<p>The issue you&rsquo;ll see - all their rules exist for a defensible reason, but in aggregate, it&rsquo;s maddening. Rock and a hard place.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p>Previously:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2018\/12\/23\/acceptable-renewable-subscriptions-pitch-screens\/\">Acceptable Renewable Subscriptions Pitch Screens<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jessica Lessin (tweet): The last two weeks have been a crash course in Apple&rsquo;s gatekeeper status over consumers&rsquo; digital lives. Apple rejected our app four times. Some of the pushback we received was so specific&mdash;such as not being allowed to underline the words &ldquo;free trial&rdquo;&mdash;I was stunned. Other requirements seemed arbitrary, such as the rule [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2019-12-09T21:50:54Z","apple_news_api_id":"4eb9392b-cbbb-46b4-b7f1-43aa8df7c3ce","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2022-05-09T18:52:29Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/ATrk5K8u7RrS38UOqjffDzg","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1846,91,1421,522,31,1667,26,2201],"class_list":["post-27514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-app-review","tag-appstore","tag-app-subscriptions","tag-inapppurchase","tag-ios","tag-ios-13","tag-iosapp","tag-the-information"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27514"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27515,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27514\/revisions\/27515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}