iPhone app: still waiting on Apple…

We submitted our app for review on June 29 then waited for about 10 days before Apple started actually reviewing what we’d submitted. Perhaps everyone there went on vacation for the July 4 weekend.

This week it’s been back and forth with them trying to explain why we require an email address as part of the registration process for new users.

Apple’s stance is that a simple username should suffice.

Now, looking at the Nirvana iOS app in isolation you can (sort of) see why they are barking about this… spammers and privacy concerns and such. Clearly they are not factoring in the whole Nirvana web-app / multi-device / cloud sync eco system. (Evernote, anyone?) They don’t know who we are so they are being risk-averse and conservative.

Adding to the frustration is that we make our case and then wait a full day for a response. Apple says no again, so we make our case yet again with more backing arguments, and wait another day for a response… and round and round we go.

The list of productivity apps that require email address as part of registration is pretty significant, and all of the major players need this for, if nothing else, password recovery. Pretty standard stuff you’d think.

I’ve been patiently letting this process play out as these seem to be the normal hoops everyone goes through on first app submission. That said, if we don’t get the green light by end of day I’m going to call in some favors as this is starting to feel a bit ridiculous.

We’ll see.

Thanks for your patience everyone.