Dear users,

I’m really sorry to say that Apple decided to reject my recent update.

First and foremost this is really sad, because this update should have made much better use of the great iOS’ Multitasking feature!

I’ve worked my ass off to make it as adjustable as I could by the user, so YOU could decide for yourself, how long you want to stay online on IRC.
There were options for:

• letting the OS decide itself which time is best
• some minutes/hours to set
• or even to try to stay online all day long

So finally you would have had the decision how much battery life you want to sacrifice

Unfortunately Apple decided that I may not use the needed functions, because they are for VOIP apps only?! Yea sure, thats a question of definition here. Isn’t text or voice not nearly the same?

The fact is, in my eyes Apple did a great job implementing the current multitasking features in iOS. Using this VOIP mode the whole app is nearly put to sleep anyway, but still maintains network connection all the time. And if it gets some bytes from its peers, it’s woken up for a second to react on that and do its work (like checking for nick alerts,saving the chat for later display and other stuff here).

So this is great, but… Apple seems to not have thoroughly thought the whole thing through!

I really see reason for the decision not to let every tiny app use this mode, because MOST services out there could just use Push Messages to notify the app or user to switch to the app. The app itself may then just pull for the needed data and it looks like it had run all the time and wouldn’t make any difference (if well coded).

BUT: In some rare cases like this, Apple really needs to think about the fact, that I (and the other devs of IRC apps) am NOT able to modify all those IRC servers all over the world. It’s just not possible to tell them to hold the chatline, send a Push Message, and resend the text to the app when it comes online…

Some users try to avoid all this by using a so called bouncer, but that just makes it usable by some few people who have the knowhow and the needed 24/7 running server somewhere on the net.

This is why I at first tried to find a very usable solution and make all this optional. So NO user could have complained about battery life because of a permanently battery sucking IRC app in the background.

Sure, I’m glad that Apple at least decided that we may use the “backgroundTaskWithExpirationHandler” function, which at least holds the app and its connections active for some minutes to check your mail and stuff. But honestly. That’s just the half way down the road… :-/

As most of you already may have read in my other blog post, a mistake by me not checking an expired certificate and sure a mistake on Apples side to not really notify on those cases, Rooms vanished from the App Store already a week ago

Back then there was no way to just update the certificate, so Apple could just resign the app and put it back in. It was indeed needed to upload another binary as “update” and have it again in review before it could get back into the App Store.

So I had to make a decision. Should I use the old binary again or should I at least use my (just ready in time) update which included some needed fixes and the new features for multitasking from above?!

I decided, IF it now needs a full new review, it would be to hard to again use the old one. And I really though Apple would see the need of real “multitasking” here and would see my way implementing it, so it would not be any problem at all.

My request for a quicker review was accepted back then, and already got from “waiting for review” to “in review” within 3 hours after submitting it. Wow! I was happy.

But then it took them until today (6 days) without any changes. So I decided to ask politely today, if there are any problems. And then came the reject

So now I’m again in the review queue, without the nice feature and waiting for a review!

Actually already without 1/4 of the really needed monthly income within the last weeks of finishing my bachelor thesis on university *mahr* :-/

[update 07-26-2010]

Since I’ve sent in this second update (without the new VOIP multitasking feature) it’s now AGAIN 4 days “in review”… I really mean IN review, not just waiting for it. Since the expedited review request was already granted, I asked again for helping with a quick review and they accepted some hours later.

But what can NOW again take so long within this review? This app was already in the store for weeks with nearly the same feature set and without the VOIP thing it’s not just a plain little update for JUST finally fixing the certificate autokick from the stores!
What is the review guy testing for 4 days? oO

[update 07-27-2010]

Just got a call from an Apple employee who is reviewing my app. He asked my to remove the VOIP stuff, so I told him that I already did 5 days ago, after the last review got rejected because of THAT already. oO
So he said that there seemed to be some overlapping here and he will now go on with the review…

*facepalm*

So far, so sad…
Björn