This sort of thing is why I'm increasingly disinterested in developing for iOS for fun (and why most of my recent side project work has been on web apps). App review is effectively a black box since the rules are applied so inconsistently, and working for weeks or months on something only to find out the Apple doesn't like it is a constant concern. Add in the the real and psychological barriers app review imposes when making bug fixes or updates, and it makes going back to the web rather attractive. It'd be nice to see Apple make some changes to the process.
(I know I could move over to Android dev, but since I use an iPhone it's not terribly interesting for side projects - though that's my problem, not Androids's.)
Fragmentation and the frequency of device- or vendor-specific bugs and other issues take a lot of the fun out of Android dev for me.
Unless you're Facebook which has recently been caught abusing silent notifications to start up in the background and continue running permanently by streaming music at zero-volume while draining battery.
Apple responds decently when developers have big media presence notice their abusive process and rolls over passively when powerful players like Facebook have them over a barrel. It's a stormy ocean when you're independent. Best to be careful.
increasingly disinterested in
You mean 'uninterested,' not 'disinterested.'
Uninterested may have been better, but disinterested works fine - see the usage notes (desktop only for some reason): http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/disinterested
Don't do anything that is likely to cause significant harm to them. Examples of this include: (a) negative press publicity e.g. porn app, drone strike app, (b) stealing from or harming their customers and of course (c) this app where they will have to cover the cost of you putting heavy objects on something that it was never designed to do.
If you want to damage your own phone go ahead. You can build a weighing app and deploy it to your phone. But expecting Apple to endorse (which is what the App Store actually is) stupid behaviour was never going to happen.
As a developer I will never develop for, support, condone or recommend Apple products to anyone I know because of such behaviour, they want a wall garden, good for them, but I'll have no active part in it.
People are dumb.
Someone, probably very soon, and probably more than one or even ten people, would overload the weight and crack their screen. At which point they would show up at the Apple Store DEMANDING a brand new phone.
When they didn't get the repair because they're too stupid to understand how glass works they would contact CNN or HuffPo or whatever and there'd be a flurry about "glassgate" or something. Same way that putting a thin phone in your back pocket, SITTING on it and then complaining it bent set off a huge issue and tons of news coverage.
There is a walled garden, this is not an example of Apple overreaching though.
To be fair, earlier phones didn't have the problem. My Motos and iPhone 5s took back pocket tension like a champ. iPhone 6 had to be replaced within 10 days.
So people are going to think "My iPhone isn't weighing this accurately! It must be defective!" because Apple never intended for the technology to be translated into a scale.
is that really something Apple would have to pay for? seems like something like that would fall well in "your fault" territory from my perspective.
my first thought was drugs, might be handy to have a scale in my pocket sometimes.
Why did you choose to display weight in grams to 3 decimal points when the measurements are only accurate to within 3g? It would be better to not display the values after the decimal point, so you don't give your users a false sense of accuracy.
Here's a more recent video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3S95b9gAC8 One decimal place (in grams) was kept since precision != accuracy.
It's a shame, it seems like a neat application and I can totally imagine using an app like this to weigh spices or coffee beans.
By accepting the app, Apple is implicitly allowing the use case of using the phone as a scale.
This may be a bigger issue than just concern that customers might ruin their screens (and blame Apple.)
Scales (for commercial use) are regulated, and devices marketed as scales but intended for only non-commercial use are explicitly labeled "not for us in trade"; Apple probably doesn't want to be seen as marketing or endorsing the iPhone as a scale, even implicitly.
"Oh, let's see how accurately it weighs 50lbs!"
Seriously ?
You would rather potentially ruin your $700 phone by breaking the screen or getting spice particles inside instead of buying a $5 scale.
I accept your point but having Apple iNanny watching over my shoulder is boring as hell.
(disclaimer: I don't own an iPhone and cannot see that happening in the near term).
I can't decide if he really respects that or if he's still hoping to get his app approved. Companies should not be in the business of trying to enforce (clearly unenforceable) laws by removing features that do perfectly legal things.
Dragon-dick dildos are legal, but that hardly means Wal-Mart is under any obligation to stock them for sale if that's not something they want their brand associated with.
If Apple doesn't want their brand to be associated with racist apps, or pornography, or pony apps, or whatever they choose, why would it not be their right to do the same as Wal-Mart?
As consumers, we can choose where to shop based on what stores do and do not stock. If you don't like what Apple stocks, don't shop in its store, and don't buy their devices.
You're right, but I hate this line of reasoning. At the end of the day, I like using an Apple product and I don't have a problem with 99% of the things they do. So simply telling someone to 'stop buying the product' when they disagree with a relatively minor issue, is silly, and it kills the discussion immediately.
It's like congress passes a law I don't like and you suggest to 'leave the country', instead of focusing on the fact it's a bad law that could be changed without having to do something so drastic as leave the country.
Debate like this can help, calling them out for things that aren't very sensible is okay and it doesn't have to immediately be met with the obvious 'under the law they can do what they want so your only recourse is to simply never use their product ever again, end of discussion'.
Let's also not forget when Apple changed its mind. For example, remember the iPhone 4? It introduced the LED flashlight for its camera, a feature none of the iPhones before had. Immediately flashlight apps were made, and rejected by Apple. Later it changed its mind and they're now a staple in every app store, and later even became an integral part of the OS requiring no app at all, without any changes to the hardware. And it didn't happen because people suddenly sold their iPhone 4 and people stopped buying iPhone 4s because they couldn't get the flashlight app, that'd never have happened. On big features, yeah, not on small stuff.
Just because something is legal does not make it morally or ethically "right".
Surely YOU should be the one who decides what constitutes "proper" software to run on hardware that you purchased?
If they are to tell me how I can and can not use my device (above what the law says), then it's not my device, and it's not a tool.
Do you, or do you fear retaliation from Apple if you bad mouth them?
[0] trying to search for it, seems lost to the memory hole
http://createdigitalmusic.com/2013/06/hands-off-apple-wants-...
Apple just called me to nicely tell me I use a private
API function to sense the area of the screen which is
covered by the finger for its articulation gesture ([CDM]
wrote about it). This is crazy – thousands of users love
it for this and it makes Orphion so expressive.
The app will be removed from the App Store in two weeks
if I don’t submit a new version without it – and I
currently can’t think of Orphion without this gesture.
So what I can recommend is
1. Everyone who wants to have the “original” Orphion get
it NOW from the app store (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app
/orphion/id495465097), it will be only be there for a few
more days
2. Backup the current version to keep it. (Michael Tyson
from Audiobus made this great tutorial)
3. Tell Apple to make this great function officially
usable in apps (Any ideas how to do that?)
So far… let’s see if this is really the end of Orphion.
No, Apple's concern is supporting this app to the future. They don't know if they'll be sticking with this same kind of sensor for future models, and they don't know that any future sensor will be backwards compatible for this app. If people get used to using this app, suddenly they'd be under an obligation to keep it working, thus losing options for future designs.
Does Apple retaliate against people who complain about the App Store review process in public or something?
http://flexmonkey.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/the-plum-o-meter-we...
(Submitted title was "Apple shuts down app that uses 'Force Touch' to weigh objects".)