Guideline 4.2.2 rejections: marketing material, web clippings, and collections of links

Guideline 4.2.2 is the rejection for an app that opens on your marketing site or is mostly a list of links. The fix is to land native users inside the product, with tabs that point at product screens and the marketing pages out of the way.

#What Apple says

From the App Store Review Guidelines:

Other than catalogs, apps shouldn't primarily be marketing materials, advertisements, web clippings, content aggregators, or a collection of links.

#What the rejection says

In substance: the app is primarily marketing material or a collection of links to your website, and Apple asks you to revise it to provide a more robust experience. Often the reviewer opened the app signed out and saw the homepage, the pricing page, and the blog.

#Why it happens to Rails apps

The web app and the marketing site share a domain, so an app that lands on / lands on the homepage. A tab pointing at /pricing or /blog, a web footer full of links, or a signed-out experience that is the marketing site all read as "web clippings" to a reviewer. Note the exception in Apple's own sentence: a catalog is fine, so a product catalog or a directory is not what this guideline is about.

#The fix

1. Point every tab at the product. Tabs are the places a signed-in user returns to: an index, a search or browse page, a profile or settings page. Never /pricing, /blog, or /about. Tabs.
2. Land signed-out users on sign-in, not the homepage. Set the app's entry so a native user who is signed out sees the sign-in screen and a short explanation of the product. Authentication.
3. Hide the marketing chrome. native-hidden on the web header, footer, promo banners, and any "learn more" sections meant for the web. Setup.
4. Give the reviewer a signed-in path. A demo account with real content, in App Review Information, so the first thing they see is the product. Submission.
5. Make the product do something. If the signed-in app is a list of links out to the web, that is the actual problem. Bring the screens in; they are Rails pages and the app renders them as-is.

#When the reviewer is wrong

If the app is a catalog, or the reviewer judged the signed-out marketing screen and never signed in:

Thank you for the review. The app is the product itself, not marketing material: with the demo account provided in App Review Information, it opens on the user's dashboard with [what they do there]. The signed-out screen only exists to sign in. The app's main screens are [list]. We'd appreciate a second look under 4.2.2.

From Joe: TODO one line on what actually got an app through 4.2.2.