Here’s a curious tale involving a Mac OS X app that got approved for the Mac App Store twice, then got kicked off because Apple realised should never have been approved in the first place.
The app is Kickoff, a collaboration and communications hub for people working in small teams. It’s vaguely similar to the webapps offered by 37signals, but runs as a desktop app rather than in your browser. Kickoff’s features include shared notebooks, todo lists, file storage, and chat spaces.
Downloading the desktop app costs nothing. Kickoff, like 37signals, makes money by charging a monthly fee.
Now here’s the weird thing: a monthly fee payment system was built inside Kickoff from the, um, kick off. Much like the in-app payments we’re all accustomed to on the iOS App Store. (Remember: these are two different stores with slightly different sets of rules.) Two versions of Kickoff got approved by Apple for distribution on the Mac App Store with no problem.
It was only when they made a routine bug fixing update a few weeks ago that the Kickoff team got a rejection. They were told they couldn’t charge their customers that way via software sold in the Mac App Store.
Kickoff’s Benjamin De Cock takes up the story:
“The problem was that we were using monthly subscriptions inside the app while in-app payments weren’t allowed in the Mac App Store.
“The weird thing is that those in-app payments have always been in the app. When we submitted the very first version of Kickoff, the review team asked us to explain the offer and how the subscription works. They approved the app while being aware of the pricing and the business model. A few days later, we’ve submitted a small update which was approved again and available in the Store. They even featured us in their ‘New and Noteworthy’ section.
“We got rejected on the third update, which was just a few bug fixes. The plans in the app and on the website remain exactly the same of course, but this time they thought Kickoff couldn’t be approved.
“To be honest, I’m not sure what happened. I called several members of the review team and basically, their answer was: ‘We’re terribly sorry, we must admit we made a mistake by approving it twice before.’ As far as I can tell, they were really concerned by our situation but they just couldn’t find a solution.
“Of course, in-app payments are coming in the Store with Lion but we couldn’t have waited for the Lion release and anyway, recurring payments will not be available in the Mac App Store. We just didn’t have the choice and we left the Store. This has been a pretty frustrating experience as you can guess, especially because we had to ask all our customers to re-download the app from our website.”
Although he sounds very laid-back about the whole affair, De Cock and his team have had to completely change their product strategy almost overnight. It may have been just a simple human error, but didn’t it annoy him?
“It was a pretty serious mistake indeed and yeah, we were very angry, but at the same time the app was still very young so it was fortunately less hard to tell all our customers to re-download the app from our website than if we already had a very large user base. It could have been even more serious I guess.”
Lion and iOS5 are very close to release now. What will the Kickoff team do if Apple changes the rules and starts allowing in-app payments inside the Mac App Store following their official release? De Cock says:
“We think they will allow it in the future but we have no idea when that will happen. I don’t see any reason yet to not use MAS subscriptions when they’ll allow them, but we’ll decide at the time.“
Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He also writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. You can find out more at his website, and follow him on Twitter @gilest.
