fíam

AdWhirl is returning bad JSON when loading custom ads, causing all apps to crash. I urge you to go to the admin panel and disable all of them.

Update: Upon further investigation, it's just failing with custom ads with non-ASCII characters Update 2: AdWhirl has quickly fixed the issue. More info at: http://groups.google.com/group/adwhirl-users/browse_thread/thread/7519ebb05ff79265

iRae, one of my iPhone apps, is now featured as one of the essential apps for Spain. Thanks, Apple!

I've been using Quattro Wireless ads in some of my iPhone applications for some months. According to their FAQ:

Q. When does Quattro Wireless remit payment to publishers?
A. Quattro will send payment to publishers within 60 days following
the end of the calender month. Quattro will accrue and hold monthly
payments due to publishers until the aggregate amount due exceeds $100.

However, at the end of September I had more than $100 and almost 3 months later I still haven't received any money from them. I've tried emailing them using their contact form for the last two weeks, but I haven't got any replies so far. Anyone else having issues with them?

UPDATE: (Dec 29th) I've just received all the payments accumulated until November 30th. Kudos, Quattro!

If you are planning to add some jokes to your application descriptions in the App Store, be warned that Apple has started to be picky about them.

Yesterday I got a phone call from Cupertino regarding Uncyclopedic, telling me I had to remove some dog raping references from the description before it could be approved. The offending lines were:

 - I assure you Uncyclopedic didn't rape my dog
* Noel Coward on Uncyclopedic

Uncyclopedic is no more than an iPhone reader for the Uncyclopedia, which is intended as a joke encyclopedia. Since I've seen animal raping jokes used a lot of times when talking about experimental software, I thought that it could be funny to software developers reading it. But it seems either I was wrong (English is not my first language) or either we have a new reason for app rejections.

Anyway, since this app had been waiting for approval since September, I just changed those lines to read:

 - I assure you Uncyclopedic didn't harm my dog
* Noel Coward on Uncyclopedic

Which looked like good enough for the app review team.

I've had some app rejections, most of them due to crashes. Lately, Apple has been improving this type of rejections a lot, since now they give you all the details to reproduce the bug and attach the crashlogs to the rejection email. Kudos to them.

However, it seems they're now getting too picky about the app ratings and, at the same time, I'm getting bothered with that (and I guess I'm not the only one).

One of my free apps, WikiAround, lets you find Wikipedia articles geotagged around you. It's been in the app store since May and it's always been rated 4+, because it doesn't give you open access to Wikipedia, only to geotagged articles. However, when I submitted the last update (which only adds the feature to set your position manually, as requested by some users) it got rejected for giving open access to Wikipedia without being tagged as 17+. The funny thing is I can find like 20+ apps which give you open access to Wikipedia and absolutely all of them are rated as 4+.

Definitely, Apple needs to start enforcing the rules for all the apps, or not enforcing some of them at all, like they do with splash screens. If you're permissive with some developers while being picky with others, that has a name: discrimination.

P.S.: If you're going to leave a comment telling me this is only my fault for developing for a closed platform blah blah blah blah, please refrain from it. I know the App Store rules and I've accepted them, I'm ranting about Apple not applying the rules equally for all the developers.