Apple won’t give you the time of day.
Update: Dear hoards of people reading this post. Please read the conclusion over here too. Apple was nice enough to explain things on the phone and made things quite clear and easy to understand. It was more of a misunderstanding than anything else.
The other day I went hunting through the App Store hoping to find a nice clock for the iPad that I could turn on while it was sitting on my desk. To my surprise, there really wasn’t anything that appealed to me. There are a handful of really nice digital clocks, but I prefer analog. And the iPad’s size feels just right for a nice big clock face.
So, not really thinking, I whipped up something in Photoshop. Wrote a quick app and had it running on my iPad later that afternoon. Itch scratched, job done!
But, hey, wouldn’t someone else like to have a nice clock too? Surely there’s more folks like me that were preferential to analog. So I nailed down the details, made a passible icon and submitted to the App Store.
A few days later I received:
We’ve reviewed your application and we have determined that this application contains minimal user functionality…
OK, fair enough. It was pretty basic. In my defense, basic was exactly what I was aiming for. I can take a hint: add some more nifty stuff. Got it.
So, I added an egregious tick sound (which you can turn off), the ability to turn off the second hand (people will ask for that anyway) and the ability to re-enable the iPad sleep timer (which I turn off by default). Now I’m two days of development time in. This is starting to take up real time!
Re-build, re-upload, re-submit. Re-sponse: Same. Ugh!
I could add an alarm, a shake to randomize the timezone, LOL cats, etc. But I really don’t want to. I just wanted to have it be a clock, but you know, nice. I mean, it’s pretty feature poor, but I’m betting you have similarly feature poor devices scattered around your house. AMIRIGHT!?
But more to the point, there’s a wide selection of craptastic clock-ware on the App Store. I don’t mean to dump on anyone, I’ll let you be the judge of what you see, but you tell me if you’d like this clock on your iPad?
Or, here’s another good example: The design isn’t half bad. The hands even have nice little drop shadows. Plus it’s free. Great!
But it clearly has substantially LESS functionality than my clock. What gives?
So, just so you know what you’re missing. Below is what mine looks like. But you can’t have it — Apple would rather you buy the one with the cat background for a dollar.
