UPDATE: Apple says rejection was a mistake. Developers are allowed to support Pebble smart watches.
As the Apple Watch is being shipped out to its customers, the forces at Cupertino appears to be cracking down on apps that play nice with other competing watches. A developer had gotten a rude shock to find their app being rejected for merely mentioning its support for the Pebble Smart Watch.
The affected app, SeaNav US has been around for close to 2 years now and they have been supporting the Pebble Smart Watch all these while. It appears that there’s a new policy to forbid app developers from mentioning any support for other mobile platforms, which is baffling considering Pebble isn’t exactly a competing mobile platform to start with.
To make matters worse, Apple responded to the developer and had pointed out its “support for the Pebble Smartwatch” description as being inappropriate on the app store. The following is the response from Apple:
3.1 – Apps or metadata that mentions the name of any other mobile platform will be rejected
3.1 DetailsWe noticed that your app or its metadata contains irrelevant platform information in the app. Providing future platform compatibility plans, or other platform references, is not appropriate for the App Store.
Specifically, your app and app description declare support for thePebble Smartwatch.
Next Steps
Please remove any instances of this information from your app and its marketing materials, including the Application Description, What’s New info, Previews and screenshots.
Since your iTunes Connect Application State is Rejected, a new binary will be required. Make the desired metadata changes when you upload the new binary.
NOTE: Please be sure to make any metadata changes to all App Localizations by selecting each specific localization and making appropriate changes.
It is as if Apple is trying to force developers to support the Apple Watch by suppressing other competing watches from thriving on their platform. Looking at the response, these apps can continue to provide support for the Pebble Watch but they are not allowed to mention it anywhere on the app description, which is just plain oppressive. In SeaNav US app situation, what’s interesting is that the rejected app submission includes support for their new Apple Watch.
No doubt this is bad news for Pebble users on iOS and the reality is that there’s nothing much Pebble or its developers can do to turn this around. So does this mean Apple might ban Pebble’s AppStore next?
