I give up. It‘s impossible to argue with Apple.

I tried to bring my unofficial iOS devRant app "JoyRant" into the AppStore. It was available via TestFlight for years and it wasn‘t a problem there, apparently. Now for the AppStore, it is a problem.

I talked with the Apple review team for 3 weeks and the discussion went in circles.
They said that my app tries to disguise as or to misrepresent another app on the store (the official devRant app, even though it‘s not available anymore, apparently).

I was asked to remove all of the mentions of devRant from any description or any place in the app. I did. Even though it was stupid because how are people supposed to know that they need a devRant account to use my app? I‘m not allowed to mention devRant.

After that, they said that it can not have the name JoyRant because it sounds too similar to devRant.
I changed it to devJoy everywhere, the app, the meta data for the app store, the github page where the required legal crap is hosted, and in the legal documents themselves.
Did it help? No, it didn‘t.

Apple then proceeded to claim that my app is trying to deceive the users into thinking that this is the official devRant app. Even though I have explicitly stated in the description that it is just an unofficial devRant client.

Now apple says that I should "revise the app content".
Which I assume means that I need to make it something different. Yeah. Great suggestion!

So, I will rename the app back to JoyRant and provide it via TestFlight, as it was before.

Thanks for reading. I needed to vent.

Are devrant servers dying? Algo sorting doesn’t load more rants and recents sorting is kinda wonky.

I tried official devrant app on ios and joyrant with same results.

This is kind of a test if I can still rant or not.

I’m currently working on the profile view in JoyRant, which turns out to be much more work than I thought.

Anyway, after many iterations on the appearance, I’m now finally satisfied about how it looks and works. Especially the category picker (Rants, ++’s, Comments, Favorites).

What do you think? Do you like it?

JoyRant build 12:

* Copy Rant Link
* Customize Accent Color

That’s right! You can pick your favorite color as the accent color of JoyRant in the settings.

The new ColorPicker in SwiftUI is really great!

Is the search function useless?
I tried it in the official devRant app because I consider adding it to JoyRant.
But it never finds anything relevant for me.
Even if I give it an exact substring of a comment, it doesn’t find it.
It also doesn’t find users (which would be useful)

Does it only work for the text in a rant?

Do you find it useful?