Unsigned: Someone may or may not have sent you an anonymous message
App Rejected!
So it turns out that the very concept of Unsigned ran against the grain of Apple’s Appstore policies. As I found out from the review team — section 22.6 of the guidelines states that apps that enable anonymous or prank phone calls or SMS messaging will be rejected. The spirit of this extends to email messaging as well they say.
Can’t argue with the AppStore guidelines — I’d agree that it’s a pretty reasonable guideline myself (though its worth noting that uninvited SMS and phone calls usually cost the receiver money; emails do not). So I removed the emailing functionality from the server. Instead, when someone sends a message to a user whose email is not registered on the service it will send you an email that reads “Someone has sent you an anonymous message!” and invite them to download the app if they are so inclined. Messages stay within the product and no one gets unwillingly pranked.
But otherwise…
The wonderful thing about all of this is that even if the app never gets through the gates it was only about 24 hours of work in total. Hardly a waste given my knowledge gained of the many considerations that goes into building a full product quickly (and also how easy Parse is to use).
Unless the app gets approved and actually gets some wonderful traction with users this may be the last I write of it. I have a couple new app projects underway and it’s also about time I started to figure out how to do some amazing stuff with my Philips Hue collection and their APIs.
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