#FF00AA

Chess Wars [sat] in App Store limbo for six weeks. Finally, this morning an Apple representative named Richard called Stump to inform him why Chess Wars was being rejected after the six week wait: the bubbles in its chat rooms are too shiny, and Apple has trademarked that bubbly design. Yes, the App Store has reached a new low.

At some point I’m running out of empathy for the review process. I make it a point to forget about my own problems with the App Store when I blog (or think) about them, but they’re not really doing much with whatever benefit of the doubt you might give them.

Remember that the six-week delay, concluded by a personalized phone call (whereas normal rejections consists in a terse email after two weeks), is consistent with the official assertions that there’s a separate committee meeting regularly to decide on a bunch of contentious cases — meaning this might be an official policy the committee just finally agreed upon. (Or it could also be one rogue reviewer with an ax to grind.)

As a reminder, I’ll just quote one of the article’s first commenters:

OK, I defended Apple on the previous post, but this is just dumb. Don’t they WANT to create some standardized language around their UI? Isn’t that desirable and part of what is considered a good platform?!