Apple continues messing with the update of iCaching

As you might have read in my previous post, I’m having big difficulties to get the latest update out in the App Store.

Apple decided to go on subscription witch hunt, and iCaching is the victim.

After the first (granted) appeal, I submitted iCaching again for review. However the second time it was rejected again. For similar reasons, but even going a step further. This time because the login screen offers the ability to sign up for a Geocaching account. This login screen is a website provided by Geocaching.com, so that one is not in my hands at all… And funny enough: it’s already there for 4 to 5 years…

So I appealed again. After two days I got a mail that I would be called within 5 business days. Luckily I still had the number of the previous appeal, so after the weekend I called myself. After a day I finally was connected to a (friendly) Apple employee. This time I had to remove all mentions of ‘geocaching.com’ from my app description in the App Store (which are there since iCaching exists (3 months after start of Mac App Store).
And secondly I had to make all premium-member features invisible for non-premium members. I was flabbergasted because in the first appeal I was asked to make those features disabled (greyed out) for non-premium members, which was exactly what I did before resubmitting….!

I did these changes the same day, and now I am waiting for 5 days again for Apple to look at the application and to decide about the login screen. They don’t want to give any timeframe or estimation. They don’t seem to care at all about you, my customers, that are stuck with a version that does not work with the new Geocaching API. And in the meantime I’m managing a flood of user mails because users are confronted with a non working part of the application.

I was always a sort of Apple fanboy, but my admiration for Apple is quickly going down at the moment. They are acting so wrong here.

The separate downloadable version that has this API support is still downloadable from here. Sorry for the continuing inconvenience. I’ll keep you posted…