Inside Our Apple App Store Ordeal

Dear Readers,

It’s been a big week! We launched the Tech Top 10—a new app to help everyone stay on top of the biggest stories in tech. If you haven’t tried it yet, we hope that you do and look forward to your feedback. You can try it for free for seven days and after that it is only $29.99 a year.

It was a big news week in tech as well. Larry Page stepping aside at Alphabet marks the end of an era for Google and possibly for Silicon Valley. You can read our reporting about what is next for Alphabet here and here. 

And next week, 13 of our reporters and editors will be sharing our predictions for the next year during our annual preview video conference call. Hope to see you there. 

How Apple Polices Its App Store

It all started with the price.

Peter Schulz, who leads our product and engineering teams, walked into my office and told me that we couldn’t charge what we had planned for our upcoming news app because Apple had “tiers” of pricing app developers must follow. Our planned price of $30 a year didn’t fit into any of those tiers.

Hmm. That’s interesting, I thought. In my 14 years as a technology reporter, I had reported in detail on the hoops developers go through to launch an App in the App Store. But I hadn’t heard that one before. We’ll make it $29.99, I said. No big deal.

Of course, that was only the beginning. The last two weeks have been a crash course in Apple’s gatekeeper status over consumers’ digital lives. Apple rejected our app four times. Some of the pushback we received was so specific—such as not being allowed to underline the words “free trial”—I was stunned. Other requirements seemed arbitrary, such as the rule that we couldn’t require users to enter their email (while Disney and the New York Times could).

And while nothing about our experience suggested we were being targeted or singled out in any way, I feel the need to write about it in detail for that very reason. Only developers who go through this process get to experience it. When the power of big tech is being scrutinized—and Apple is entering more industries, from TV to News—more people need to understand how Apple’s app review process works and what’s at stake.

 The Process Begins

We’ve wanted to launch an app for a long time—and it has been by far our most requested feature. We ran through various ideas over the years, but nothing clicked. Reading articles on your phone was pretty easy through the mobile web after all. We wanted whatever app we launched to have a point beyond helping The Information subscribers read our in-depth journalism.

With the interest in tech news exploding, we had an idea: launching an app that would offer a great experience for subscribers and also let us reach readers who don’t have any business connection to tech but wanted to stay on top of it. We’d offer them summaries of the day’s top tech stories, all written by our expert team, along with a calendar of upcoming events and breaking news alerts.

After we decided to launch in time for our sixth birthday on December 4, the team and developers got to work. We had about 10 weeks.

Our engineers finished a demo quickly, and the team started using it. They did their best to comply with Apple’s copious rules. (You can scroll through them for hours here, if you like. I love that Apple calls them “guidelines.”) 

Thanks to the team’s quick work, we submitted the Tech Top 10 for Apple App Store approval on Wednesday, November 20. We expected some pushback. Everyone gets it. We fixed a small technical issue the system flagged and submitted again.

The next day, one of our developers got a response from an App Store reviewer, one of the legions of people who review the apps in painstaking detail, as I would soon learn. The company had an issue with the copy on our subscribe page.

The copy we submitted read “Annual + 7-day free trial, $29.99.” The reviewer told us it wasn’t clear that you would be billed after 7 days.

What else could it mean? I thought. But there was no point in fighting it. We removed a line below that noted the annual price was 15% less than the monthly price and added that people would be billed at the end of the trial period.

Fixed and resubmitted. We were feeling good.

It turned out the wording issue was only beginning. On November 22, one of our developers got a phone call from our app reviewer.  

First, there was still an issue around the one-week free trial. He didn’t like that we had made the “free trial” text red and underlined it. That made it too prominent relative to the price, he argued. Really? The prices were clear in big boxes taking up half the page. But ok. We removed the red and the underline and bumped up the size of the price.

Then the big ones. If we wanted to launch, we had to disable a part of the app that allowed Tech Top 10 users to preview The Information articles and subscribe to read them. The reason: our The Information subscription—which is a separate subscription from the Tech Top 10 —doesn’t go through the App Store. I knew that to sell the Tech Top 10 app through the App Store, we had to use the App Store payment method. But I didn’t realize how far Apple’s grip on commerce went.

The change they asked for was easier said than done. A core part of the app was allowing The Information subscribers to read full articles. How could we explain that part of the app to non-The Information subscribers without pissing off Apple?

Searching for a solution, I thought back to all the times I had tried to download an audiobook from Audible on my iPhone and been shown some vague language telling me why I couldn’t.

I always hated this; I wanted to be able to buy the audiobook from my phone. But I understood why Amazon, which owns Audible, didn’t want to give Apple a cut of every sale and directed me elsewhere to buy the audiobook and then back to the app to listen to it. We copied whatever language Amazon had settled on with Apple figuring it would fly for us, too. (Thank you, Amazon.)

Next, our app reviewer had also determined that some of the news briefs in the app were available for free on our website, which wasn’t allowed. I guess they saw it as the app was trying to ask people to pay for content they could already read for free.

But that was an absurd interpretation. The app did many things and yes, some of the overall content appeared in a tiny brief section online that we didn’t bother to require a subscription for because each item was very short. But seeing no way to assuage Apple, our engineers rushed to put any briefs on www.theinformation.com behind a paywall.

Before we submitted again, we decided to make sure all these solutions worked for Apple. Our app reviewer told us he would call us back the next day. He didn’t and it looked like the app launch would be delayed. We made plans to push it back.

Peter finally got a call Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Our solutions would be acceptable. But our reviewer sprung another issue, this time around our log-in process. While other apps could require an email as part of registration, we couldn’t because our content wasn’t “user-specific.”

Peter noted that he had signed up for the subscription video service Disney+ just the day before and been required to provide his email. He was told that streaming video services qualified as user-specific businesses.

He was also told that if we were a print publication, we may have been allowed to require an email too, for reasons that are still unclear to me. (If The Information launches a print newsletter once a year, you will know why.)

 But guideline 5.1.2 said “If your app doesn’t include significant account-based features, let people use it without a log-in. Apps may not require users to enter personal information to function, except when directly relevant to the core functionality of the app or required by law.”

This was a major setback and getting into a debate with Apple about “core functionality” seemed futile. Without the email of someone who signed up, we had no way to communicate with them outside the app, to tell them about new features, ask them to review us, etc. It all had to be done through Apple. They would be known to us only as a string of numbers.

Peter and our developers discussed whether we could change the app to qualify for one of these exceptions. But, for the sake of speed, we decided just to build an alternative signup process at the last minute that allowed users to skip that step.

 The Final Road

We resubmitted the app on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, hoping this would be the last time. We had bowed to Apple’s every request, even the new ones that kept coming.

We got rejected again. This time their objections related to our About Page, among other things. It couldn’t mention our website because our website is a link and that link might eventually take someone to a page where they could subscribe to The Information (similar to the article issue). So we racked our brains for how to explain to the world who we were without telling them where they could go to learn more about us. We came up with some vague language that says that app is written by reporters at The Information. That’s it. 

The Tech Top 10 was finally approved on Monday and we went live Wednesday. I am in awe that our team hit the deadline.

Our Android app launched Wednesday as well. All that took was a push of the button and a short waiting period. But so far, 86% of our usage is coming from iPhones.

We’ve been thrilled with the launch and the positive reviews. We’ve received a lot of advice that the best way to build buzz is to get featured by Apple in the App Store or buy ads to promote it in the App Store. So the team is trying to figure out whom to email to try to promote the app and looking into buying some ads.

While writing this column I, of course, reached out to Apple’s PR team, which responded rapidly. They directed me to this website about Apple’s approach to privacy and competition. The upshot: App store regulations are designed to protect user privacy and all rules are all applied the same.  

With about 100,000 apps submitted a week, many of them trying to mislead or scam consumers, Apple obviously needs tough rules which are consistently enforced.

But this whole wild process has left me with many questions.

How does it hurt consumers to tell them we have a website where they can learn more about us?

Should Apple be allowed to exact a 30% tax on any transaction that happens after someone opens the app?

And, perhaps most importantly, what should we do when what Apple tells us is important for protecting user privacy is also clearly good for Apple’s business?

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• As Alphabet Grows Obsolete, Page and Brin Step Aside by Jessica Lessin, Nick Bastone and Nick Wingfield
• Introducing the Tech Top 10 by The Information by Jessica Lessin
• With Public Debut Looming, DoorDash Projected $450M 2019 Loss by Amir Efrati
• Who Wins and Loses at Alphabet From Page Departure by Nick Bastone and Amir Efrati
• At Cloud Jamboree, AWS Makes Room for Frenemies by Kevin McLaughlin
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