Apple is causing a stir among developers with a new round of rejections targeting apps that use Dropbox, says a report at The Next Web. The issue first surfaced on Dropbox forums when an app developer posted a rejection letter from Apple that cited section 11.13 of the app developer’s agreement. The rejection said,
We found that your app provides access to external mechanisms for purchases or subscriptions to be used in the app, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines. Specifically, this app contains a link that takes the user to Dropbox via Safari.
It appears that Apple is enforcing its rules on subscriptions and applying it to Dropbox because users who sign up for a Dropbox account have the option to pay for extra storage. Several other developers chimed in with their own rejections, each of which points to the same 11.13 section and names Dropbox or Google account creation as the reason for the rejection. This isn’t a group of rogue developers using a backdoor to access Dropbox. These folks are using the Dropbox API and the recommended method to let users sign up for a Dropbox account if the app wants to store data in Dropbox.
Until Dropbox can figure out what is going on, it has updated its API and removed the “create account” link and the link to its desktop version.
[Via Dropbox and The Next Web]