Hey, this is the Daily Overpass! My name is Eric and I make apps! Now today, I want
to talk about Apple Rejections with Guidelines 4.3.
Alright. So, I know it's been a few days since I've done a video. It's really easy to get out of the habit
of doing things. Sometimes you miss a few days. It's like going to the gym, you miss
a few days, it becomes easier to miss the next day. But today, I want to
talk about Apple rejections, coz I just like five minutes ago, got off the phone
with an Apple reviewer. I was kind of at a little argument in the reviews
things, not an argument really I was just trying to justify my position and
they called up to justify their position, And because they're the
ones who own the App Store, their positions stays. But anyway, it was about
Apple guideline 4.3 which is, I don't know if you, guys, have ever been, if you,
guys, released the app, sorry, you may have been caught up in this. I was initially-
when I first started releasing apps, I released my first language game,
which was Hindi Bubble Bath and then I thought, "Wel,l we might as well use these
same resources to go and do a a Mandarin version." Then actually, no, we did
Mandarin first because that's what I learned in the army and then we
thought, "Well, might as well use this for other resources too." So. we just started
creating these and I was using like the same icon, the same graphic assets,
everything like that. After a while, they started rejecting them, saying
guideline 4.3. And 4.3 what it says is that, the
apps are too similar to each other and it's like you're spamming the market. I
don't know the exact wording of it, but you know. it's sort of like, you
can't just keep putting things out there over and over again, like three
skins and everything. So, you know over the last few year,s we continue to
do this, but we started doing it in, you know, where we change every game
significantly, so everyone has unique music and graphics
and icons. And we tweak them a little bit based on the language so as
the language learning resources, everything I got. And I thought,
everything was fine. Everything was going fine. I mean, haven't had any
trouble and then they rejected one a couple weeks ago. I just was so- I
just raced it to say, "Hey, actually, no, this is good. This is unique on
its own. It may not look like it, but if you really look at it,
you see, that it's different from the others. We have to use
different learning methods and all this kind of stuff for this language, it was
Indonesian, alright. And they said, well, no, it should be- they're
saying is it should be one app, which I could see where they're coming from.
And, you know, we have this discussion years ago and that's why we started
doing individual. Their their way was, you know, what you should
do is have, rather than have lots of different apps for learning, different
topics, you should have one app with in-app purchases and people could go
through and download and install the topics. And my entire thing was from a
marketing point of view, there's no crossover between these markets. Somebody
who wants to learn Vietnamese is not the same person as somebody who wants to
learn Portuguese. And they're completely different ways of marketing to them, that
there's different- differences in the languages there's
a lot of, you know, we hired a lot of voice actors, so we have a lot of
stuff going into that and it's just over. But from a technical
point of view, yes, it's possible. I mean, it's messy. I mean, you have just like
language gained. But from a marketing point of view it's what
bothers me the most. It's because I know when I'm marketing a
Chinese learning application, I know that I'm marketing towards people who will
want to learn Chinese, were traveling to China or they have Chinese children or
whatever. And so and I know that when they go into the App Store, they're
gonna be searching for learn Chinese or learn a certain language or they might
not be looking for a certain vocabulary words and all the keywords. Everything is
geared towards that way. If it's something like learn languages, then it's
going to be something that's uh, you know, as you know, like if I wanted my
kids to learn Chinese, I kind of say learn languages in the App Store.
It's just we only have like a certain amount of keywords, a certain
amount of whatever, so it's something that, you know- in the end, I just enjoyed
the course, that's okay, yeah, right. Whatever. I'm just like gonna
have to look into it, either stop doing it all together or you
know, I don't know. I mean, I just got off the phone with
them. So, anyway, it's just one of these- one of these things and it's been
an issue in the past. The thing is I know that there are other brands,
that are probably bigger companies that can get away with this kind of stuff.
Whose applications are much more similar to each other than mine are.
But you know, it's just the way it is. I can see, I can understand,
I think what they're trying to do stamp out a lot of the re-skinners and
the clones and all that kind of stuff, that goes out. You know,
that the app markets are just completely flooded with them, so that I can
understand. Maybe - maybe, I'm just- I just need to
figure out a way to make this work or we just give up altogether when it
comes to these games. So, what I want to ask today is, have you had
any trouble with app rejections specifically with the spamming thing?
I know a few years ago, people were like putting out- I knew one guy who was
doing an app a day or two or three apps a day, they were
just re-skinning everything and I mean it was crazy. But this is
something I haven't really had that much trouble with. But I mean, have you had
trouble with- if you release the apps or have you have trouble with 4,3?
Have you had any other trouble that keeps coming up in terms of the App
Store? And really love to hear about it. Anyway, that's it for today I'll talk to
you, guys, later.