iOS app rejected by AppStore for opening mobile Safari

Question

We have created a Bluetooth Low Energy app in iOS to provide beacon services to a partner's web app. The work flow is:

Browser -> App -> Browser.

We have to use an iOS app in order to connect to a Bluetooth Smart beacon, get some data, and send this data to the web app. Unfortunately, there's no way we know of to do this from the web app.

We've also tried running our partner's web app inside a webview but it was glitchy and unusable. The way we have it working, it works fine. The user taps something in Safari, there's a quick screen shift to the app, and then a quick shift back to the browser and they move on with their work.

Unfortunately, the app store keeps rejecting our app. They say:

"We still noticed that your app opens a web page in mobile Safari on launch which provides poor user experience. Please revise your app to enable users to sign in or register in the app.

"We recommend implementing the Safari View Controller API to display web content within your app. The Safari View Controller allows the display of a URL and inspection of the certificate from an embedded browser in an app so that customers can verify the webpage URL and SSL certificate to confirm they are entering their sign in credentials into a legitimate page."

Has anyone else run into this problem of calling an iOS app from a web app and having the app rejected? I think they fundamentally don't get what we're doing, despite many back-and-forths with their reviewers, and a video that clearly demonstrates how the system works.

At one point I was threatening to drop support for iOS because this is becoming onerous for us to persuade some anonymous reviewers over and over that our app really does what our partner wants it to do, so just approve it and let us get on with our business. This is a limited distribution specialized kind of app.

Is there any kind of a hotline or human being we can talk to at the Store? They must have to deal with thousands of updates a day, so I assume they're swamped and probably a particular case gets bounced around between all sorts of reviewers.

How to escalate? Any help/advice appreciated.

Also, if anyone can suggest a better way to do our workflow, I'm all ears!

Thanks for any help.

EDIT: For clarification, the previous version of the app was accepted with no difficulties, even though the workflow is largely the same. Yet, when I fixed some bugs and improved the performance and submitted it, they've balked. When you run the app by itself, it comes up in standalone mode where not much happens. I don't even see how they arrived at the conclusion they did, unless they have some way of peeking into the code which is what I assume they did. It does eventually invoke the browser that way, but only if you have a certain type of beacon which they can't possibly have. I'm baffled.

Anyway I'm going to simply remove the standalone behavior for now, just display a message that this must be called from the web app, and hope that satisfies them.

Answer 1

Are you saying that the user is not meant to open the app himself? In that case, arrange for something meaningful to happen if the user does open the app - such as provide an instruction manual. Bouncing straight into Mobile Safari is indeed a bad experience.

This is equivalent to what keyboard apps do: they install the keyboard, but the app itself does nothing useful on its own.

And if you can't use the Safari View Controller as suggested then file a bug or make a technical support request.

Answer 2

I removed the standalone features of our app, and just presented a static screen. Then the app was readily accepted.

The lesson learned: don't try to put too many workflows into one app unless they're obvious and easily demonstrated. Because of the hardware component (BLE beacons) it was difficult to demonstrate our workflow to the appstore folks, so finally I just removed the pieces that we didn't need right away.

Later we'll create a separate app to handle the standalone workflow that is not called from a mobile web app.