GV Mobile To Return

09. Sep, 2010 0 Comments

Apple has updated its app approval guidelines, much to the relief of many a disgruntled developer. This has allowed GV Mobile to be re-submitted and will likely see the return of the app to the iPhone.

Very briefly, Apple’s app approval guidelines were not transparent, were quite arbitrary, and seemed to not be applied consistently. This made many developers frustrated when their apps were rejected from the app store. One of the most relevant apps that I have been following is GV Mobile by Sean Kovacs.

GV Mobile was an app for the iPhone which was a nice front-end to Google Voice. It was approved by Apple, went on sale for a short time (I bought it), and allowed a user to dial phone numbers, listen to voicemails, and access all of Google Voice’s functionality. Unfortunately, at some point it was disapproved of by Apple and was removed from the App store, on the basis that it replicated functionality of the iPhone (namely the dialer).

This was odd as there were many other apps on the App store which had dialers and “replicated functionality” yet were allowed to remain. Speculation was that it was more of an attack on Google Voice than on apps with dialers.

The fallout of this was when users restored their devices, or bought a new one, they could not get access to another copy of GV Mobile, despite having paid for it. This was not the developer’s fault (he subsequently released the app on Cydia, the app store for jailbroken iPhones), and left many users with nothing to show for their money.

Another consequence of this was push notifications never came to GV Mobile, even for those users who never deleted the app. No official app status means no use of Apple’s push notification servers. This means you could get a voicemail or text but not know about it until you manually checked the app.

All of this is now water under the bridge as Sean has gotten confirmation that GV Mobile can be resubmitted to the App store and will likely see it get approved.