4.3 Design Guidelines - Apple please reconsider how this is enforced.

We have spoken to many developers in previous months who have run into issues with the new 4.3 Design Guidelines rules & had their apps rejected, seemingly by a bot, or in general, by a reviewer because of similarities to previous apps. They have been asked to combine their similar apps into one container app.


We understand why Apple is finally cracking down and doing this. They are trying to clean up the Appstore of clones, useless junk & other spam apps.


In the process however, this has seemingly hurt indie developers who are not using templates, and design their own games from scratch. We've spoken with several developers, many who pride themselves in creating unique content such as educational & games for children, receieve these notices with no method to appeal, and auto-responses making the same blanket statement, ending in frustration for the developer & wasted months in development time.


They are asked to combine their apps or games into one "single container app" to reduce the clutter in the Appstore. While the idea of this sounds great in theory, it is flawed in exection, simply because some apps and games are not meant to be combined.


Take a first grade educational app for instance. Say you program a math game that caters to 1st grade kids. Then you use that engine or framework to develop a math game for 3rd or 4th graders. Combining these games would make no sense from a marketing perspective, and from the perspective of a parent who is purchasing the app for their child who needs a math game for first graders only . We have actually spoken to parents and customers in an email survey, who said they would not like this change, and it would make it more difficult for them to find the app they need to install for their child's specific age group. They have asked us to not combine these apps that they have stored on their device, as they like to have separate applications and games for each of their children, in their respective age groups & content supplied.


This is just ONE example or highlight of how this actually ruins the end user experience. Forcing developers to combine apps into one container app does not benefit customers, especially those that are accustomed to having the one single app for it's functionality and purpose. That applies to educational games, tools that target a specific market group, or diet apps that target specific dietary needs and so forth.


Apple - We beg you. Please reconsider this new guideline, and don't be so heavy handed with the rejection notices. We understand the need to clean up the Appstore, and provide a better experience for users, & remove spam, but taking the guidelines this far is not the way to clean up the store.


We feel this is hurting the end user experience, and many of our customers love having the single application or game, rather than one larger bloated file installed on their device.


Don't force developers into combining apps into one container app. It does not make sense for the end user experience, and does not make sense from a marketing or distribution perspective whatsoever, and actually hurts the end user experience. Combining 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade math games does not equate to a better store experience, just as combining diet apps from various diets, does not help that person who is trying to get healthy, & wants a very specific diet app tailored to their specific needs.


Please reconsider revising this guideline, as I don't feel we are alone in this battle.


We appreciate the ability to be able to publish games to one of the best Appstores on the market. We hope that Apple revises these guidelines, so things aren't so heavy handed and difficult for indies, who are already struggling to make ends meet in this very competitive marketplace.


Sincerely,


Appstore developer

Replies

I would try appealing the app rejection notice. Have you tried that yet? Explain the situation, and let them know that you deleted the other apps. Hopefully they allow that one in.


The guidelines are very unclear. 4.3 Design - Spam has to do with not creating similar apps, but they also can delete apps they deem as low quality or a saturated category. It's a very broad spectrum, guideline, and it seems to only judge developers on a case by case basis. There doesn't seem to be any clear, black and white rules regarding the guideline. It's at the discretion of the reviewer's subjective opinion on the app submission.


We've encountered both scenarios with our apps, and heard other stories from other developers too.


I also believe that this guideline is a very slippery slope for Apple. How many developers that supported Apple by purchasing products will cease doing so? How many customers of legitimate developers, snagged by this new guideline, will drive consumers to other platforms, and in turn, other devices?


I just don't see this ending very well unless they reel it in a bit with these new guidelines.


An extremely slippery slope, and some very broad, unclear guidelines that will drive good indies to other stores, and some of their customers with them.


If anyone is going to WWDC next year, find someone and brings this up to them

Guidelines 4.3 is in place for very good reasons - Take a look at the Google play store. Be creative and be unique instead of trying to game the system with copy cat apps.

There are more than a million (two million?) apps on the App Store. Essentially, they have all the apps they will ever need, especially from indy developers. They could easily manage very well without us, espeically if the big companies kept publishing apps and play by Apple's rules.

Has this issue been updated on any of the forums or are there any updates of rules changing soon? Our companies apps are being flagged for this reason, and like many have mentioned, we would prefer not to have a container app when so many of our users have requested the individual apps.

I had chats with a few people from the review team.


These are considered to be spams according to the guideline 4.3.


- No similar app is allowed under your account. When they say "similar", it simply means its appearance are alike. Even if targeted users are different, no similar app is allowed. Also they may say "they are made using the same frameworks", it's nothing to do with the frameworks we think. It simply means "they look similar". Even if the two apps are built upon completely diffrent codes (not built from a template), they are categorised as spams if they have similar user interface.

- Releasing a free "Lite" version and a paid version is no longer accepted. Must use in-app purchase in one app instead of releasing an independent paid app. Otherwise they are rejected as spams.

- Releasing upgraded new version as an independent app (like "MY APP" and "MY APP 2") is not allowed. Old version must be removed from the store to release a new app as a different app. Otherwise they are rejected as spams.

This definition of app spamming jives with what I said in another thread -- multiple similar apps from the SAME developer.

We got another app rejected because the app is not compliant with Guideline 4.3

View on App Store


This app displays waveforms of a sound file (typically spoken words), enables users to clip a certain area, make a sound clip playlists, convert it to MP3 using LameMP3 library, etc.


We don't have any similar apps. We believe the store is not saturated with similar apps.


The standard of the guideline 4.3 is getting very strict recently.

My app https://itunes.apple.com/ae/app/fuzzy-the-spider/id1123309651?mt=8

Has been marked as Design Spam. No idea why reveiew just keeps on replying with template reply.

Has anyone considered suing? I would imagine a large number of companies affected would join the suit.

We did this as well. We removed all but one app in our series, submitted it and it was rejected for 4.3.


In our case, we had initially consolidated our series into a container. We removed everything but the container and sold it for one month. The sales as expected were horrible because the marketing suffers terribly and the app icon is super-generic. We've been selling for years and know roughly what to expect for any given week in the app store. The container sold far worse than our series of apps individually. The sales of the container were also worse than our top selling app by itself. So, we decided to discontinue the container and sell only our top seller. This where we are now -- rejected for 4.3 design spam with no other apps like it in the store.


We've only received the 4.3 templated response in the resolution center. Last week we had call with the App Store. We had the impression from the call that this course of action was OK (though they wouldn't say definitively), so we submitted and were rejected. We're appealing now.

If that is the case, how do review team explain the Angry Bird series ? Candy Crush series ? Goal Simulator series? We can find "Monument Valley" and "Monument Valley 2" on Appstore from the same developer. Aren't they spam?

Any idea how I combine a 120mb Chess game with a 60mb Solitaire game and a 40mb Sudoku game? Apperently they are similar (they aren't) and I have many of the same type of app (I don't) and they will call me (they haven't).

The worst part of it all is that they tell you to create a "new" app and add all your other similar apps (that they have arbitrarily marked as spam) into that new app. So what happens to the download & revenue of that new app? Its a complete disastor!

The way apple ranks an app higher in searches that other is by multiple factors and biggest of them are how many users have downloaded the app and how many active devices are using it. If you had an app that was in the app store for 6 years and have had thousand / million of downloads with active users, your only option at this point is to

- either remove your most downloaded app, create a new app and add other apps into it. Whether they belong into that one app/category or not

- OR remove all your other apps they think as spam and keep your most downloaded app active.

This rule is so arbitrary that it sicken me. Most of us got grandfathered into this stupid rule. I want to be clear here, I have never once made an app from a template and written all my apps from scratch. Since app store conception back in 2007 we were told "there's an app for that" and users have been trained that if you need an app for something specific then search for it. We devs created & marked apps for specific tasks. What sense does it make to put a checklist app with an alarm clock app with a checkers game app? Can you imagine if they did this to disney, google or facebook apps? Just look at how many duplicate apps Dinsey has. They won't touch big devs as that will cause a major PR nightmare at national news level. I feel like they purposely targeted small devs that can't do anything about this.

Instead of making their search algorithm better or making app store completly different, they came up with this dumb rule that hey we are not going to allow more apps in the app store. If they don't look at the code, which I believe is BS form them, how in world do they know one app looks / behaves similar to the other? Do they look at the screenshots and determine that?

I believe this is what transpired

- In 2015-2016 I personally saw thousand upon thousand of similar apps being added by fake chineses/russian accounts. Most of them were 99.9% identical

- App approval had become jokingly easy. Remember 1-2 day app reviews which you knew had no human intervention. I know I had submitted some buggy updates that used to crash if they had only launched and clicked the very first button in my app. They didn't and approved updates left & right.

- App approval only took their sweet time on new apps and not the subsiquent app updates. Spammer knew that explotied that loop hole.

- I even saw spammer change app description "after" approvals to some fake description to defraud the users that had nothing to do with the app. Some of these frauds made it big. I personally saw "Minecraft 2" fake app show up twice on the top paid app list right at the Dec appstore shutdown.

- Each of these spammer had mutiple app accounts, if one got closed they would submit the same app through another account.

- If an app got flagged during review for whatever reason then those spammer would just created a new app and submit the same code base again till it went through their approval cracks.

- When they finally figured this out they sent mass developer termination notices in mid 2017. They mapped which dev is using the same credit card to pay for their dev accounts and terminated related accounts to that credit card.

- Instead of punishing just those spam devs and improving their review process, they are now killing anyone with AI robot, which we are training. Once your account is flagged as a spammer, every single update will get rejected automatically not matter what and all your appeals will be ignored.

At this point I cannot update my apps or create new ones. Same template rejection comes up for everything. I have no choice but to either wait out this rule and hope it will change in the next year or two or delete all the apps that weren't selling well and keep the best sellers alive and hopefully that will remove the spam flag.

Good info/summary, thanks for commenting.


All we need now is for Apple to come up with a new policy where dev's aren't billed for a Developer Program account -unless/until- their (bot reviewed) app is approved...