Ad Viewer: My first app rejection story

This isn't a rail against the arbitrary policies of the Apple Store, instead it is the story of my somewhat cheesy application, Ad Viewer and its trip through the application approval process.

With the advent of iAd I thought there was an opportunity for an application that displayed ads, they would be interesting in and of themselves, and a possible market.  I thought that there was a good chance that Apple would reject it, all it does is display ads.

The timeline:
Submitted on June 17, 2010 @ 20:08
In Review on June 23, 2010 @ 20:16
Rejected on June 25, 2010 @ 09:37

We've reviewed your application Ad Viewer and we have determined that this application contains minimal user functionality and will not be appropriate for the App Store.

We encourage you to add additional user functionality to Ad Viewer and resubmit it for review.

I wasn't too surprised, I knew my application had limited functionality.  Just to explore my options I sent an email in response, asking if it was even possible for an application whose purpose in life is to show ads, was acceptable.

My surprise was that Monday evening I received a call from Apple.  A representative called to discuss the my application.  He told me that the form emails often do not give a proper representation.   We discussed the application, and he told me that the basic idea was not going to be something Apple allows in the application store.   I certainly understand this policy, although I think my Ad Viewer would have been useful and profitable, I understand why Apple would disallow it.    He was very professional, courteous, and spent a good deal of time talking to me.   I was impressed with the way Apple handled my very minor application.

Ad Viewer: Shameless attempt to cash in.

It looks like iAd, Apple's new framework is the future of advertising on the iphone.  They are even attempting to shut out some of the other larger players, such as admob (based on interpretation of the new SDK).

We'll these new ads are supposed to be spectacular, so that they will be entertaining by themselves.  Well, the best way to test this out is to create an adView, its sole function is to display ads.   I'm going to submit it to the Apple store, they might reject it because it doesn't have much functionality, although I think it has at least as much as a fart application or an application that displays a frame and calls it a mirror.


I created a new xcode project and choose my target.  I then added the iAd.Framework.

Next I went into interface builder, and created a view with some iAdbanners.

Running my application I get:

And choosing an ad gives: 

As a developer it could hardly be simpler.  There really is some more work to make things nice, but this gets an ad running SO quickly compared to some other frameworks I tried.

The main worry I have is that I would like to have access to other ad networks so that I could support iphones running  3.1.3.  Iad will  not work on those.

Ad Viewer: Rejected

I can't say its a surprise, but my Ad Viewer application was rejected for minimal functionality.  That's a fair statement, I spent minimal time developing it.   While I think it would have been useful  and done OK if Apple had approved it, I'm not surprised it was rejected.

The NDA has been released on iOS 4.0 it, so I'm publishing my blog articles.  I'll post my code soon.   I didn't publish my old posts in order, so there will be some confusion I think. 

Ad viewer: Finishing up.

This is actually all the functionality I'm going to put into adViewer.  I have no idea if Apple will let it into the store, or if it will reject it because of 'limited functionality'.  I also don't know if they are going to allow multiple banners per page.

I think its fair enough to let it in, it provides the ability to see the new iAds and request new ads.  As a developer I would probably download something like it, just so I could see how the new iAd stuff works.

The next thing I need to do is create some icons for my app, and set the startup image to match the initial image of the ads.

Then I'm going to submit it and see how it does.