Daring Fireball who previously informed the world about Google’s usage of undocumented API in their mobile iPhone application, has just reported about the same issue again. This time around, it was indie developer Landon Fuller of Plausible Labs who happened to be the victim of ‘alleged’ private API usage.
According to Fuller, Apple took approximately 33 days to inform him on the status of Peeps, an application that turns the iPhone’s address book into an animated photo album.
Upon review of your application, Peeps cannot be posted to the App Store due to the usage of a non-public API. Usage of non-public APIs, as outlined in the iPhone SDK Agreement section 3.3.1, is prohibited:
“3.3.1 Applications may only use Published APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any unpublished or private APIs.”
The non-public API that is included in your application comes from the CoverFlow API set.
For the record, Peeps CoverFlow-like interface was implemented from scratch using the public APIs. Furthermore, any application implementing undocumented private APIs (like Google’s mobile application) takes the high risk of breaking when a new update is released by Apple.
While Google had publicly admitted that they’d used the undocumented APIs and got away with it, I’d sure hope that Apple quickly gets this cleaned up and release the pending application into the App Store soon.
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March 12th, 2009 at 2:40 am
My application got rejected yesterday for the same reason. And the funny thing is I have zero undocumented APIs in my code. It almost feels like some incompetent nincompoop is reviewing the apps using a tool which just raises red flags based on an engine written by a loser programmer. And it incorrectly flags the use of undocumented APIs. I am so frustrated because there is nothing I can do at this point. I am at the App Store’s mercy