Build, get rejected by Apple, ship anyway

Welcome to Homescreen.me (2016)

Homescreen.me began its journey almost six years ago on August 15th, 2010 as a simple website that offered anyone the ability to upload and share their iPhone homescreens with their friends and followers anywhere, including Twitter and Facebook, with just a simple link. It was a straightforward way to showcase which iPhone you had and which apps and wallpapers you were using on it.

This is what the original Homescreen.me looked like

The project began out of a simple observation. Back then, Twitter users would upload and share screenshots of their homescreens with their followers by uploading them to sites like Twitpic or Img.ly. This was fine, except that you’d get a random URL (like http://img.ly/hJ7rk) every time you shared your homescreen. You’d also have to field questions from your followers, such as, “Do you use the white iPhone 3GS or the black one?” or “Which app is that blue icon on the 3rd row?”

With Homescreen.me, you could get your own personal URL for your iPhone — http://homescreen.me/preshit , along with a way to add a description & wallpaper source so that your followers could easily figure out what they wanted.

After an extensively long “beta” period, Homescreen.me finally launched 4 years ago, and here’s what the Media had to say about it.

The home screen of an iOS device is a window into the way people work play and live on their portable computers, and Homescreen.me provides a nice way to both share yours and discover others.

— Matthew Panzarino, The Next Web

A cool feature of Homescreen.me is the ability to look at other people’s Home screens. The “Explore” tab lets you browse accounts, including staff picks and popular users. You can also search for Twitter handles you follow to see if they have shared their Home screens.
There’s something special about sharing your Home screen with the world. In a sense, it can be pretty revealing. But it can also be very rewarding to know that you helped someone find a cool new app or wallpaper. And who doesn’t enjoy discovering new apps and Home screen layout ideas for themselves?

— Alex Heath, Cult of Mac

Over time, we realised that the easiest way to upload your homescreens would be directly via your mobile device. Long story short, we started building a native iOS app in early 2015 which would let you do that, and a lot more.

Some of the features that we set out to build were:

  1. Ability to easily share your iOS homescreen, along with details about your device, apps and wallpapers.
  2. Ability to upload and share your watch face and details about your Apple Watch.
  3. Ability to browse and explore handpicked homescreens of our Featured Users.
  4. Easily find out about which apps and wallpapers someone is using.
  5. [Bonus] Keep a history of a user’s homescreens and give the user an easy way to see how their homescreens have evolved over time.

After a few months of development, we invited some of our users to help us beta test the app.

The beta went great — we received some phenomenal feedback and reviews from our users and based off their comments, we polished the app and made sure it was perfect for launch. But then…

We Got Rejected

After about a week of being “In Review”, Apple rejected our app for reasons that we still can’t wrap our heads around. After the initial rejection, we tried to work through it via multiple iterations — but it just didn’t work out for them.

What did we get rejected for?

Apple executives explained to us that we cannot showcase a homescreen springboard image within the app — stating that the springboard was Apple’s IP and it was against Apple’s Brand guidelines.

The rejection was not only disappointing and heart-breaking for us, as we had put several months of hard work into the app, but we also found the reason very hard to believe.

A Homescreen is very personal to each and every user. Every user customizes his Homescreen with the wallpaper of his own choosing and the apps of his own liking. The homescreens we feature are of handpicked users — primarily because everyone loves to know how these different users have arranged their homescreen, what wallpapers they use, what apps make it to their homescreen etc. The featured users are also handpicked by our editorial team and are not random user uploads.

Essentially, Apple claimed that no matter how customized or stock a Homescreen was, we just could not display Homescreens in our app.

Now that we have the context set, few things are unclear to us from a rejection standpoint.

1. The screenshots appearing in the Featured feed are manually curated and there are no links to apps in the homescreen. It’s just a screenshot of a user’s homescreen — this doesn’t even conflict with something like the App Store Discovery (if at all).

2. This is just a showcase of homescreens, along with a user’s device, which benefits Apple directly. We don’t even showcase jailbroken homescreen images to our users, if that is a concern. Only curated beautiful homescreens.

3. Homescreen.me is merely a platform that showcases user submitted content, something that other apps like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit etc. already do. Example — what if someone shares a homescreen image on Twitter? Is that a violation too?

Unfortunately, Apple just wouldn’t budge. A work-around, we were told, was to offer users a simple text area where they can type which apps they use on their Homescreens.

Build and ship!

Since the App had hit a dead-end, we decided to revamp the existing Homescreen.me website with learnings from the app and optimised it to today’s standards.

Starting today, we’re officially launching Homescreen.me — a freshly launched service where iOS enthusiasts can not just browse the homescreens of the hand-picked and Featured users, but also upload and share their own homescreens with their friends and followers. We also support the Apple Watch, so if you have a watch face that’s worth taking a look at, you can share that too.

Homescreen.me is also a great way to discover and find out about what apps everyone is using, which wallpapers are trending and what arrangement people have on their Apple Watches.

So head over to http://homescreen.me to sign up and start sharing your Homescreens with your friends and followers or check out our Featured Users over at http://homescreen.me/featured

Homescreen.me is a part of the iXyr Media network and is powered by the team at NFN Labs. We would love it if you could give it a try, showcase your wonderful homescreens and watch faces with your friends and followers, and help us spread the word. Recommend this post (by clicking ♥️ the button) so other people can see it too… Savvy?