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One App Demonstrates the Downside to Apple's App Controls

The Hueman app was rejected from the app store for mysterious reasons, but its developers fought back.
Image: Rob Boudon/Flickr, Sportsilliterate/Flickr

It was a simple idea: grade your mood for the day, once a day, and after a few months, the Hueman app would have enough data for you to visualize your moods over time so you could determine if you really hate Mondays that much, or when spring came or whatever. It’s not the most useful thing ever invented, but that’s not exactly the standard you hold apps to, is it? So why was Hueman initially rejected from the app store? It wasn’t really clear. And why did Apple just change its mind and allow it? No one knows.

The idea of Hueman's mood tracker/data visualiser came together over a five-day weekend in San Diego. “There were nine of us,” Matt Toback, one of the developers told me over the phone. “We knew were going to make something, but we didn’t know what that was.”

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What the group of “developers, designers, musicians and filmmakers” came up with was based on the work of one of their friends who was a robotics PhD, and who had been meticulously tracking his own relative happiness in an Excel spreadsheet for 10 years. The ups and downs revealed when the friend’s long-term relationship faltered and ended, also when another began and led to marriage.

“There’s this beautifully simple idea that works, and that we know works because he’s been doing it for so long,” Matt said. And an iPhone app—something that’s with you every day and can prompt you—is the natural shape for the concept to take. “There’s this clean way someone could use it a little bit every day and get some value out of it in three months or one year or whatever.”

Five days later, Hueman’s prototype was being tested. It’s a really simple app, by design. Anything more complex becomes a chore and you'd be less likely to use it every day, and the point of the app is getting a big sample of moods. So Hueman prompts you to give your mood, once a day, with a simple, “How are you?”

Hueman's Graph function. Image: Hueman

“We intentionally tried to keep it as open-ended as possible, tried not to use words that direct someone too much to happy or sad or up or down and let someone best define it for themselves,” said Matt. “Once a day it’d check in, and it only takes as long as it takes you to reflect on the day—just a minute.”

Starting in May 2013 the development team tested it on themselves. By the beginning of February they applied to put it in the app store. On Lincoln’s Birthday, the dream was deferred. Apple sent this email:

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2.12

We found that your app only provides a very limited set of features. It only functions as a once a day mood tracker. While we value simplicity, we consider simplicity to be uncomplicated - not limited in features and functionality.

We understand that there are no hard and fast rules to define useful, but Apple and Apple customers expect apps to provide a really great user experience. Apps should provide valuable utility, draw people in by offering compelling capabilities or content, or enable people to do something they couldn't do before or in a way they couldn't do it before.

We encourage you to review your app concept and evaluate whether you can incorporate additional content and features to provide a more robust user experience. For information on the basics of creating great apps, watch the video "The Ingredients of Great Apps."

“It was rejected on concept, which is obviously really subjective,” Matt Toback told me. “It’s not like ‘the app didn’t work, so fix this,’ or ‘it’s crashing.’ The follow-up to that is that because it was rejected on such subjective concept, there’s no tangible step forward.”

The process by which Apple accepts or rejects apps has long been a real crapshoot. Alasdair Allan, a developer and author of the book Learning iPhone Programming, told Betabeat that Apple operates behind a "wall of secrecy," leaving developers to work off guidelines, one of which is that the app should be simple. At the same time an app has to adhere to the less Delphic admonition, "Nothing in Excess," including simplicity.

The Hueman development team heard rumors—Apple was developing a comparable app of its own with Nike and was eliminating competition; it’s just like the Weather App, etc. They just sort of laughed, and wondered why a company renowned for its simple, elegant design wanted feature bloat. There was a similar app in the app store, so the issue wasn’t with mood trackers, although ironically, the app that was accepted to the app store didn’t work when Hueman’s JP Nacier downloaded it. People told them to design Hueman for Android and be done with it, but as iPhone users, they weren't quite ready to give up the dream.

As the team sat in the dark wondering if the essence of the app had to change, just as mysteriously, on Thursday afternoon, they heard back from the appeals process: “This app version has been approved. All communication regarding your previously-rejected binary is now closed,” the note on the forum said.

So, happy ending, the app goes up tomorrow, for free.

Matt was simply perplexed. “The whole process has been a bit bittersweet; the newly approved app is the exact same binary as the original app we submitted,” he said in an email. “Is arguing for your app now commonplace at Apple, or were we the anomaly? Did we catch an approver on a bad day? How many other app makers go through this every single day, and how many don’t appeal? It really makes me go back to your original question—what happens to a banished app when you don’t fight for it?”