From Mark Jardine at TapBots (the creators of the excellent Convertbot iPhone app) has written about their recent App Store rejection:
We’re no strangers to silly app rejection emails from Apple, but this one seems to take the cake (at least in our opinion). Convertbot 1.4 was rejected because our icon for Time is too similar to one of Apple’s default resource icons for History/Recent. They say users might get confused that our Time category might mean History or Recent. Now I might be able to understand if this happened when we first submitted Convertbot, but there have been multiple releases already so why is this a show-stopper now? It does worry me that our product has to be held back for another 1–2 weeks for something so trivial.
So what’s the plan? I need to redo the icon, I suppose. But Convertbot icons were meant to use as little lines/shapes as possible to identify the category. I feel that our current icon represents time as simple as possible. So how can we make Time different? What if it’s set at 9 o’clock instead of 3? Is that acceptable? The big problem here is the only way I can get that answer is by making the change, resubmitting the app, and waiting another week or 2 for Apple’s verdict.
Ridiculous.