Apple is known for the very high standards it sets for the ‘user experience’. In this respect they are rightly, admirably, inflexible – but sometimes I wish there were a little wiggle room!

We’re developing our second App, expense4you at home. It’s an App for domestic expenses, complementing expense4you, which is for business expenses, and which you can already find on the App Store.

The process of getting an App onto the App Store is a simple one (once you’ve understood how to do it) and usually you must wait just a week before Apple approves or rejects what you’ve submitted.

Around Christmas there’s a week when nothing happens, so when we submitted expense4you at home on Friday 19th December we were hopeful that the App would be on the App Store two weeks later.

But there was just one tiny thing they didn’t like. In expense4you at home you have to register if you want to upload your expenses to our server, and only once you’ve registered do you have the option to extend your use of the App beyond the first free month. This option is called an In App Purchase. The problem was that this option would only appear if you closed the App and reopened it after registration (something that you might reasonably expect that people would do) but slightly ‘unfriendly’ nevertheless.

So, nearly four weeks after submission, we finally understood that this little, probably unnoticeable, deficiency is the reason why Apple won’t approve the App. It’s easy to correct the problem and submit again but then we’ve got to wait at least another week.

Irritating, excessive, pedantic?

Yes, but you have to admire them for their high standards.