If you’re frustrated that your app was rejected from the App Store, you are in good company.
Scott Virkler, senior vice president of eProducts at global science and medical publishing behemoth Elsevier, had a few choice words about Apple’s approval process – and getting rejected by it.
Virkler, speaking in San Francisco at Appnation Enterprise, said his company had three apps rejected by Apple just last week, “because they don’t get our business.”
Elsevier is a $400-million-a-year business with over 2,600 medical journals, from titles like The Lancet to more niche ones, spanning the gamut of topics from Artificial Intelligence in Medicine to Zoology.
“The apps were rejected, they think we’re trying to spam them with all this content about global medicine or something,” he said. “Apple thinks apps are all about feature functionality, but in our world it’s all about the content. They treat us like an entertainment company, so they think we should put everything into one app as if it were TV, but our content doesn’t work like that.”
For example, he pointed out, The Sleep Medicine Review and The American Journal of Cardiology are two completely separate products with different subscribers and advertisers.
“We’re trying to get someone [at Apple] to answer the phone to have that discussion,” he said. When interviewer and Appnation founder Drew Ianni noticed his subject was getting a bit hot under the collar, Virkler responded: “Yeah, I have an opinion on this.”
Hiccups in the app approval process aside, Virkler says they hope to have all of their publications available in app form by the end of February. They already have dozens of publications in iTunes.
Flagship publication The Lancet was launched as an app free to subscribers, deliberately without much publicity, over the Christmas holidays. Virkler says a significant number of downloads (guess those docs and researchers found iPads under the tree?) speaks to the significant interest for the company’s content in app format.
“The medical market is huge and they are fast adopters of medical tech,” he added.
Nicole Martinelli is a San Francisco freelance writer who heads up Cult of Mac Magazine, our weekly publication available on iTunes. You can find her on Twitter and Google+. If you’re doing something new, cool and Apple-related, email her.
12 responses to “Publisher: Apple Rejects Our Apps Because They Don’t Understand Our Business”
Not a lot of detail here from Elsevier on exactly what the problem is, but if these are journals, magazines, or books, then they shouldn’t be “apps.”
There is a huge problem with the app store being flooded by “apps” that are really just thin binders around a bunch of content (essentially a book or a website). The app store would collapse if they gave up on trying to keep books and apps separate.
Clearly this is an issue where Elsevier does not understand the “app store” business. Honestly how complicated is it for them to make a free Elsevier app, and then all those medical journals subscriptions are merely an in app purchase which can be searched for within the app.
I know. Just like Conde Nast does. You just buy the Conde Nast app and then if you want to read New Yorker or Wired its just an in-app purchase. Or Furture Publishing. You just buy the Future Publishing App and then is you want to read Mountain Biking or MacLife you just unlock them in the app. And so on to the ofther publishers.
Wait a minute. That’s not how it works at all. In fact, I don’t know of any publishers that have come up with a single app that allows you to download multiple magazine subscriptions. That all have multiple apps, just like Elsevier tried to do.
Clearly this is an issue where Athren Glory does not understand the “app store” business. :-)
The one exception to this is ZInio, but they arn’t the publisher. Have said that, I wish Apple would just buy Zinio, and integrate it into the OS.
Then why did Apple add the Newstand to the OS if they didn’t want magazine publishers to publish their magazines as apps?
Do you really thing they expect people to remember which publisher did which magazine and the go Newstand->Publisher->Magazine?
Elsevier already has 42 iPad apps and 33 iPhone apps in the AppStore, so my guess is that they know a little bit about how it works.
What does Apple have to gain here? Apple should be encouraging more vendors like this to produce better and richer content, and let the people who understand their own customers make their own decisions on business plans. If they keep up this behavior there will be a customer backlash. There is probably more to this story than is publicly available.
Check out the same kind of drama going on at http://www.pdawiz.com where Apple is being DUMB and rejecting law enforcement reference apps that they used to pimp and sell to police chiefs, etc. all over the US. Apple needs to hire a Vice President of Common Sense and get rid of the bozos running the App review process – fire the lot of them.
Maybe this is what Elsevier should do and release all their publications under News Stand. Or do they already do that?
As a side note, when it comes to content like publications, newspapers, books, subscriptions, etc. MS is taking the best approach with their new Windows 8 App Store. If the content creator has built their own in-app purchasing system and back-end system, they are free to use it and MS gets no cut of the sales. If they use MS’ in-app system and back-end service, MS gets 20% to 30% depending on the volume of sales. This is what Apple should do. It would alleviate a lot of headache.
I’m sure Apple has no idea what it’s doing. Another one-sided developer bitch session. *yawn*
Make it a single app and use either news stand or in-app purchase for specific content.
Medical is a vast area and Docs usually buy titles based on their own field. They are buying oncology or orthopedics and they would rather access titles based on keywords related to their field. Apple should come up with a better answer on discoverability in order to avoid this situation. Maybe NewsStand equivalent for medical literature.
Any indication as to why they were rejected, Apple would have given a specific reason. They don’t understand our business is code for we did something that is not allowed.
No. The Newstand app is one of many recent attempts to *differentiate* between apps and magazines. The problem is when people are looking for apps they find hundreds of irrelevant “helper” books and other crap data bound up in an app wrapper.