如果自定义生产力应用程序被iOS App Store拒绝，该怎么办？

Question

I know this question has been asked before, I'm just trying to be absolutely certain I understand.

I have a manufacturing client who had an iPhone/iPad application developed about a year ago to allow their distributors to easily (on the job site) run some configurators to get specs and estimates on which parts they would need to order. The app store rejected the application as being a "marketing" application.

This is a real productivity tool for these distributors and adds value to the iPhone/iPad in their hands. I understand that the same tool can be created in a web app, but my client simply wanted to make the tool available while their distributors are on job sites without connectivity.

They have far too many distributors for "Ad-Hoc" deployment. What can they do? What are the options? (I don't consider asking their distributors to jailbreak their phones or switch to Android to be legitimate options.)

Answer 1

如果您成为iOS企业开发人员 （每年299美元），则可以将其分发到公司内的iDevices，而无需经过Apps Store批准程序。

Answer 2

You could always appeal the rejection; Or make some change to your app to demonstrate that does something more than just marking (product information) like connect to some live service to indicate product availability, or place orders.

Answer 3

Another alternative is to make a web app that is available off-line. You do this by creating an Offline Application Cache, using a cache manifest file. Details are in the book "Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS and Javascript" from O'Reilly.

Answer 4

The alternative that is under your complete control is to do a web app that can be downloaded/clipped and run off-line. An off-line web clipping can have its own icon as well as use local data storage. Some documentation on some of the files needed for this is here: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/offline.html

One thing you could try with the App store submission is to add a password protected account login to the app to make it look more like a private client app than something that markets products to the general public.