Steve Jobs said that 95% of applications are approved in the App Store within 7 days, and the 5% is made of crashy apps, apps that don’t work as advertised and developers who keep using private APIs in their software. Then, there are developers who submit working apps and don’t get a single word from Apple for months. It’s a limbo, a quite undocumented zone which Apple hasn’t clarified, yet it exists and, according to many devs, it’s the worst place you can find yourself in. What’s going on with Reeder for iPad, for instance?

The Appsfire team submitted an update to their iPhone app two months ago, and Apple never got back to them. The 1.0 version was approved back in August, so were the updates, but God knows what’s wrong with the 2.0 version. They decided to remove the 1.0 version before Apple will, and focus on “out of the Store” alternatives for the future.

They wrote a blog post about the situation:

“Your app-roval process is full of holes; you have approved Appsfire v1.0 last August and wished you hadn’t because almost no one had any real clue about discoverability issues back then - indeed, we were the very first to address this issue in an app. Now you know what’s at stake, so you’ve locked-down every aspect of the SDK ToS. Which is probably why you wouldn’t write anything to us for 56 days re: Appsfire v2.0, despite our numerous calls, emails, and high level contacts (period during which you had no problem approving similar apps). Was your intent to shut us down by playing the waiting game until the legal team had caught up? The problem remains, in fact we don’t even know what the problem might be since you are not talking to us.”

This is one thing about the App Store Apple has to fix as soon as possible. These apps might be “well below the store average”, but still reading news like this is not good for the public image of the App Store.

[via TechCrunch]