My brother and I have a nifty little app in the iOS app store. It lets you save and share animated gifs. It has a few nice features, like the ability to grab gifs out of tweets, from safari, from most popular reddit client apps, tumblr, or from other apps like imgur. I encourage you to check it out here
gif-wallet.com.
That's not really the point of this blog though. For the last 11 releases we've offered a "feed", where we deliver you some of the best gifs we've seen in the last week or so. Some are classics, others are funny, some are cute, some are impressive feats, some are "fail" gifs, but we never include pornography, or even curse words in text. We expect some of our users are children, or sensitive types, even though our app is marked as 17+, as you are free to get gifs from wherever you want.
Now, this week, we got this message from Apple:
Obviously, some moron at Apple doesn't understand our feed, so 4 minutes later, I clarified:
Hoping this would solve it, but having dealt with Apple on these types of issues, as well as reading the horror stories from other developers, we were prepared for the worst. Now, this is just a hobby for us, but it's pretty inconvenient when something like this happens. I really feel sorry for the people who are trying to make a living through the app store.
Their response, ignoring their own policy was the following:
So, we'll do that. Regardless of how stupid it is. Regardless of how almost every app in our competitive space lacks this functionality. Regardless that many, such as the imgur app actually display their own user generated content. Whereas our app only displays a highly curated feed of gifs produced by me. If a user doesn't like the content I'm giving them, they should probably just delete the app.
Apple is slipping.
