Newsstand

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Last night I got a call from App Review: the content in the Bits und so app did not meet the requirements for Newsstand. Newsstand, I was told, was intended for magazines made up mostly of text.

I managed to resist asking what percentage of the content had to be text, and whether it needed to contain a certain number of capital letters.

The employee said she would pass along my criticism.

Why Newsstand in the first place?

The idea was that Bits und so could download episodes in the background over Wi-Fi, so they would be ready to play as soon as the notification for a new episode appeared.

Taken literally, the review rules make Newsstand a perfect fit for a publication like Bits und so. Look up “periodical” and “magazine” in Apple Dictionary and you’ll find definitions that apply to the show.

The show comes out regularly, follows the format of a radio talk show, and features a range of topical, editorially curated content.

What Apple leaves out of its rules, while quietly enforcing it during review, is the requirement that Newsstand carry text-centred content: magazines of the kind you might find at a traditional newsstand. I can’t understand how backward and absurd that is, especially from a company that wants to shape the future of publishing. Even at Apple, it seems, there are fans of dead trees.

Leaving this requirement out of the rules is highly questionable.

When I brought up Newsstand’s bumpy launch and its baffling requirements, an Apple employee told me, “I wouldn’t disagree.”

App Review seems to have internal rules for all sorts of details that don’t appear in the semi-public guidelines or in the developer agreements covered by nondisclosure. One such rule, and another reason to reject a Newsstand app, is: “Don’t use wooden shelves.” No joke.

Even if Apple really does want Newsstand filled only with dead trees, that is no reason to limit background downloads to that category. Plenty of apps would benefit from them, even with the same restrictions: Wi-Fi only, once every 24 hours. There is no technical limitation. App Review is simply tying the feature to the Newsstand category in the App Store metadata.

I’m going to remove the Newsstand code from the Bits und so app and submit it to the store as soon as possible, so listeners can finally get the iOS 5 features that have been ready for months. While the Newsstand decision was pending, I couldn’t submit an update without ending the review process.