Our 4.3 “Design: Spam” nightmare | Part 2

Introduction

In Part 1 of Our 4.3 “Design: Spam” nightmare, I outlined my frustration with how selective Apple is at applying their Review Guidelines.

As I mentioned, we’ve been required to make a reduction to the number of our apps in 2017 and then, in 2019, we’ve been required to fully consolidate all of them. However, the same rule did not apply to our competition. Not only were some of our competitors allowed to keep the old number of apps. We have a new competitor who entered the market with only one app and was allowed to release 3 extra theory test apps in March, three months after Apple forced us to remove ours. Frustrating, isn’t it?

As mentioned in the previous part, I do understand that there can be a time lag in enforcing new rules. However, what frustrates me is that I did highlight our competitors for years. Yep, that is since 2017.

In this piece, I want to document chronologically all cases of me highlighting competitors who violated 4.3 rule in my emails to Apple representatives. Obviously, it is not the only channel I used. I’ve also provided this information in Review Notes, in responses to App Review team in Resolution Center, etc. However, I did not keep track of those and there is no reason to believe that the App Review team is allowed to act on such info. However, it is reasonable to expect that providing info to Apple representatives who discuss the need to consolidate your apps will result in them using that information to tell your competitors to do the same. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

Timeline

August 2017

After several months of seeing our apps being rejected, and a lot of my activity on Apple Developer forums, I got a call from Apple representative “A” who explained to me what the 4.3 rule is and what Apple wants to do with it (reduce the number of Apps).

November 2017

I have prepared an update which was reducing the number of our apps from 12 to 7. To be honest, at that point I praised 4.3 rules. Such consolidation seemed like a super reasonable balance to me.

December 20, 2017

Our updates have passed. In a “thank you” email to representative “A” I outlined four of our competitors who were also in violation of 4.3 clause. I provided links to make it easy to view their apps.

May 3, 2018

Seeing no action taken regarding competitors which I highlighted, I emailed representative “A” again. I asked him to look again into this situation and I also highlighted one competitor again. I used only one company as they were our most direct competitor at the time and had the highest number of apps.

Within a couple of days I received an email from representative “B” who assured me that App Review will apply rules uniformly, it just takes time to go pick up all violating apps. At that point in time, such statement was reasonable.

September 22, 2018

I emailed representative “B” informing her that since our call in May no progress has been made.

September 25, 2018

I receive a response from representative “B” informing me that she routed the info which I provided to Apple’s compliance team.

October 2, 2018

I inform representative “B” that we received an email from the App Review team demanding that we consolidate our apps, even though we did not release any new apps since agreeing our consolidation strategy with Apple in 2017. I also tell her that probably this email was meant to be delivered to one of our competitors who had more apps at that time than we had before consolidating ours in 2017.

Representative “B” responds on the same day and tells me that she will look into this. Soon, our update was released without any issues.

May 15, 2019

Our update to 6 of our apps was rejected due to violation of 4.3 Design:Spam rules. The second part of our Saga starts here :)

After an appeal, App Review team did allow it to go through. However, it was a one-time exception. They started demanding that we make further consolidations.

As usual, we were given an extension, and were allowed to submit some critical updates, but it all ended with us leaving just two theory test related apps in the App Store within a couple of months.

March 22, 2020

I emailed representative “B” again reminding her about competitors who still violated 4.3 Review Guidelines and who had no issues updating their apps.

May 16, 2020

I noticed that a new competitor who entered the market at the end of 2017, released 3 extra theory test apps. Their composition is hence almost identical to what we had a year ago when App Review requested that we consolidate our apps into one.

Such developments frustrated me, so I sent an email to representatives “A” and “B” and to a representative of DVSA. DVSA is the organisation which licenses all theory test related companies in the UK and they have been phenomenally helpful in this.

Market structure

A year since we were required to consolidate all our theory test apps into one, and almost three years since we were required to decrease the number of our apps, competitors whom I highlighted in my email on December 20 of 2017 are still allowed to ship category-specific theory tests.

Here is how our market looks right now:

Us

We have only two apps left for iOS. One is our Theory Test app, and the other one is our Highway Code app. They do not share any content, so of course Apple is OK with that.

Sky Unlimited

That is the new competitor I mentioned. Below are the apps which they have in the App Store.

Deep River Development

A competitor whom I highlighted in my emails to Apple back in 2017. They did reduce the number of their apps, but are still allowed to keep category-specific applications, as well as to ship multiple apps for some of the categories.

Quantech

Yet another competitor who is allowed to release category-specific apps.

Conclusion

To be honest, I hope that my saga ends with Apple realising that allowing category-specific theory tests is sensible. It is what we did in 2017 and what they allow all our direct competitors to do. I hope my latest email will persuade them to allow us to do the same