Screenshot: WIRED
One of the things we most looked forward to in iOS 8 was widgets. A longtime Android feature, Apple introduced widgets as a part of Notification Center, which you access with a downward swipe from the top of the screen. By giving third party apps access to this coveted space, users could quickly glean information about their day and more efficiently navigate their smartphone experience.
Except that it seems Apple is still undecided about what’s allowed in a widget, and what’s not. Apple rejected an update to the app Drafts this week because the buttons in the widget redirect the user back to the app in order to process or complete tasks. This is supposedly not allowed under section 25.1 of the App Review Guidelines, which state “Apps hosting extensions must comply with the App Extension Programming Guide”—except that the text in this programming guide don’t seem to explicitly say this function isn’t allowed.
Drafts’ developer Greg Pierce was told Notification Center’s Today View is to be used for informational purposes only. (Pierce was not told to remove the buttons from Drafts’ widget or his app would be removed from the App Store, as other stories have reported.) The app’s widget has remained relatively unchanged since October 15 and has undergone three prior app updates without issue, so the sudden rejection was surprising.
But Pierce isn’t the first to come under fire for his app’s widget functionality. Calculator app PCalc was told it would get pulled from the App Store because “widgets on iOS cannot perform any calculations.” After further consideration, PCalc (along with other calculator apps and widgets) were later deemed OK. And shortly after iOS 8’s debut, the app Launcher was removed from the App Store because its widget created shortcuts to other apps and websites so you could launch them from within Notification Center.
In these cases, the widget rejection is confusing because Apple specifically offers a mechanism for opening apps from Notification Center through app extensions: “A Today widget (and no other app extension type) can ask the system to open its containing app by calling the openURL:completionHandler: method of the NSExtensionContext class.” Why offer this functionality in the first place if it’s not allowed?
These select app rejections are further confounding because so many other apps also include widgets with buttons. When you tap a date in Fantastical’s widget, for example, you’re taken into the app so you can create a new event. Evernote has buttons for creating new notes. Strava has a button you tap to start recording a new activity. And journal app Day One has a button for starting a new entry. These functions are all incredibly useful and endemic to the app itself, and a seemingly natural extension of the app as a widget feature.
If Apple does decide, uniformly, that such functionality isn’t allowed across its mobile platform, it’s going to severely limit the iOS 8 experience. However, it’s more likely that this is a growing pain. Apple’s app reviewers notoriously err on the side of caution when it comes to app approvals, so it’s likely these rejections are a result of evolving developer guidelines, increasingly complicated apps, and human error. Regardless, the situation is frustrating for developers, who may now have misgivings about updating their apps or creating a widget, and problematic for app users who’ve grown to like these widgets the way they are.
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