Being Rejected

Last year I was working on a Nine Men's Morris mobile game called Doublemill. My job was to implement a REST-based server back-end on the Google App Engine. You might remember a couple of posts on that. My colleagues were responsible for coding the Android client. Since I'm an iPhone user and I'm not going to switch to Android anytime soon, I decided to port the game to the iPhone/iPod touch platform.

Tonight I got an email from Apple telling me that they have rejected Doublemill Lite! Although it is kind of annoying, the email was somewhat clear on what I need to to do to fix the problem. It even had a screenshot attached, pointing out what my mistake was - if it really was one.

This is the screenshot apple sent back to me:

What's wrong here, you might think? At least that's what I thought! It turns out that you cannot tease your users with features they can never get with that particular version of your application.

Doublemill Lite features a Player vs. Player and Player vs. iPhone mode. You can challenge your friend by using the same device or play against your iPhone. The upcoming Doublemill Premium version will feature a Player vs. World mode, where you can challenge the world over any kind of internet connection.

My idea was to point out that this is a Lite version by putting the Premium features in the menu. People could immediately see, what's to come or what they are missing out on. However, Apple doesn't think that it's a good idea. And they might even be right. Doublemill Lite is not going to be updated with those features, because we will release a dedicated Premium version soon. People only using the Lite version will always see the disabled menu items and that's kind of messy.

I took the liberty to fix two other things in addition to addressing Apple's issues to remove the two menu items. Now we are back on track and hopefully in the App Store early next week.