Our App Store promotional art work got rejected, what happened next was bananas…

There it was, the most awaited email form the app store powers above. The email every app developer dreams of, the email that stories are told about and parties are thrown to celebrate, the email with a subject: App Store: Promotional artwork request…

The email that starts with: Your app, <insert app name here>, is being considered for promotion on the App Store…

A few weeks ago, we received this message. After we regained consciousness, we celebrated for a few days straight and once the hangover passed, we carefully created our promotional artwork, which looked something like this:

We sent it off and started to obsessively refresh the app store pages, hoping and praying that that we are about to take it over.

But instead of millions of downloads, the next email we received was: App Store: Promotional artwork has been rejected.

The reason for the rejection? Our image contained the actual device (i.e. the phone)? Wait, is that the device that the app was built for in the first place?That was definitely a surprise. Fair enough, it is actually stated in the instructions, we were just too tired from celebrating getting the email in the first place, to even notice that.

So we decided to remove the phone from the image and replace it with something that can not be mistaken for hardware.

Hopefully this one will be accepted this time.