PhoneGap officially permitted on the App Store
Its been a while since I’ve made an update to my blog, and I figured it’s far overdue for a new post. My life over the past little while has been divided up into 4 chunks: my family, my work, my weekend consulting, and my own personal application development. Somewhere around the second half of that list is sprinkled a bit of PhoneGap development.
PhoneGap vs Apple, resolved
First, I’d like to announce that I’ve made headway with my interactions with Apple. They were convinced by my argument that PhoneGap-based apps, just like any other apps developed by users who have access to a rich API, should be judged by their own merits and not prejudged based on what tools were used to built them. This is fantastic news, and means that apps submitted to the App Store will not be rejected solely because they’re built on PhoneGap. Now, if the application is buggy or if a developer tries to do something underhanded with it (for instance, changing the behavior of the app after Apple approves it) that is still cause for a rejection or worse consequences, but the same goes for any application released to the App Store.
Apple did have some requests though. To ensure that apps are released with a “Known Good” version of PhoneGap that they can trust as not having a fundamentally bad design, they wanted to have a version number that would be considered stable and acceptable. Additionally, they would like to have some way of easily identifying the version of PhoneGap used, so they can easily check that little box that says “Don’t reject it just because of its framework.”
I had a meeting with the good folks at Nitobi over a few beer, and ended up updating the version number to 0.8.0, and added a version tag that is added at build-time to the compiled iPhone application bundle. This will make it quicker for Apple to approve your apps, as well as remove any guesswork on their end about whether or not to trust your application.
The catch…
As with all good things in life, there is a catch. Since Apple doesn’t have any idea what version of PhoneGap any apps already submitted to the App Store for approval may be running on – and as a result has no idea whether it’s a safe version of PhoneGap or not – they’ll have to reject all the PhoneGap applications in their queue, and kindly request that you resubmit your apps once you’ve updated to the newer version of PhoneGap.
I want to stress that they’re rejecting these apps only to ensure they’re running the first Apple-approved PhoneGap version, and not for any other reason. Once you update and re-submit your apps, they’ll reenter the queue and will be reviewed just like any other iPhone application. This doesn’t mean they won’t reject your app for some other reason, but at least PhoneGap won’t be a blocker anymore.
I have some additional announcements and general thoughts on PhoneGap and my use of it to post, but since this news is so big, and since I’ve been too busy lately to update my blog in a while, I thought I’d open with this post first. I’ll hopefully resume my regular blog posting soon, so please check back later.
Update: For more information about the origins of my conversations with Apple, see my posts titled Updates on Apple / PhoneGap and Open letter to Apple iPhone Developer Support.