App Rejected App- 4. 2 Design: Minimum Functionality

Hi All,


Apple rejected my app yesterday for not following design guidelines. Below is there message ?

---

Guideline 4.2.2 - Design



We noticed that your app’s main functionality is to market your service, with limited or no user-facing interactive features or functionality. Apps that are primarily marketing materials or advertisements are not appropriate for the App Store.


Please see attached screenshots for details.


Next Steps


We encourage you to review your app concept and incorporate different content and features that are in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines.


We understand that there are no hard and fast rules to define useful or entertaining, but Apple and Apple customers expect apps to provide a really great user experience. Apps should provide valuable utility or entertainment, draw people in by offering compelling capabilities or content, or enable people to do something they couldn't do before or in a way they couldn't do it before.


We look forward to reviewing your revised app.


Best Regards,

---

The app is simple with following functionalities.

1) Display list of Categories & products.

2) Products detail screen

3) Try It Option - Which opens camera or Gallery. The image which is selected is placed on the image captured.

-- Its more like one image on another. It helps users to select best matching furniture & furniture accessories.

4) I'm Interested - Which sends user data to backend.

5 ) Intro about the Company.



Question : Do I need to add more functionality to get app accepted or Is there a way I can play around with UI & get it approved. Pls help!


Folloiwng link to check designs of app - https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B3VUdj4v7BPmR2FqNlJWLWE0bUk?usp=sharing


Thanks,
Ani

Replies

How did it go? I am in the same situation

I'm in the process right now, and its not good. Everytime you ask them what's wrong, they just copy and paste the previous answer. They are not helpful in describing what exactly is the problem. You can ask for a call back I was told, and sometimes that helps, but they are not obligated to call. I am still waiting on my callback, and just hoping when I get to speak to a person they can give me specifics about what needs to be changed, etc etc... The crazy thing is that my previous upload and this new update are practically the same. We did some minor changes that were like simple page renames, added a spinner loader for some pages, nothing more, and now they won't accept the new update. It's truly an insane way to run things Apple.

Hello,

I'm in the same situation, the app is in the store fore years, many updates - Now another update just some small bug fixes, rejected by 4.2 Design: Minimum Functionality...

Do you have any news ? Did they call you ?

Regards

Tobias

hey devs,


are there any further news. I am in the same situation right now?


thanks

I ran into the same issue today. Seems they're really pushing this one. In general I don't like rules this vague and dependent on the reviewer's judgment (it's really annoying when they say it's not up to their customer's expectations, but at least they no longer say "less than very good"), and it's idiotic to use this rule to reject updates that may be important fixes to an app that has over a hundred thousand downloads, but again, the rule is so vague, what can you do? In these kinds of cases, I rarely receive specifics when I asked what they wanted me to do, and in one case they told me to start from scratch, so I try not to talk to the review board anymore.

>I rarely receive specifics


For good reason. They're not going to build your app for you, and anything they say now could change w/updated policies, etc. come sun up tomorrow.

Hey,

Have you got any success. I am stuck in the same situation. I am working on a shopping app, with home page, product detail page, cart page etc. It also has notifications, also a few webviews too. The app got rejected for guideline 4.2. I asked them what is the reason they just send back guideline 4.2, all points of which are okay in app.
Any point that you suggest?Thanks in advance.

The same situation.


App was approved in the beginning of February, I made update, got "4.2" rejection, tried to add functionality 4 times and still give same rejection.

It seems like your app is a catalog of products. If your app can be done as a website, App Review would likely reject it based on Guideline 4.2.


However the "try it" functionality seems to be an avenue such that your app leverages on native iOS functionalities. If you could have an augmented reality "try it" function (e.g. placing a virtual furniture in the user's living room), then could be grounds to surpass Guideline 4.2. Also you would need to highlight these "beyond web" features so that App Review can find it within a few seconds of opening your app. One way to showcase these is via "welcome" screens that is only shown on first launch (and afterwards accessible only via a deeply buried button).