Bad news for folks who were looking forward to Sparrow’s iPhone 5 update. It appears that it’s going to take longer than anticipated, as Apple has rejected the update submission due to it violating its App Store guidelines.
Sparrow developer Dinh Viet Hoa announced the news yesterday afternoon via Twitter, saying that Apple had not approved the team’s latest update for its iOS app, which included support for iOS 6 and the new iPhone…
From Viet Hoa’s Twitter timeline (via The Next Web):
“Apple called to tell me that Sparrow has been rejected. Our app will be removed from the appstore if we don’t submit a new version soon.”
Why? What’s wrong with it?
“We managed to get a webview edition + the keyboard appeared without the user had to tap on ios5. We’re fighting with apple to get the update of the app through the AppStore validation process.”
Apparently, the rejection had something to do with the implementation of rich text editing on iOS 5 devices. So Viet Hoa says the next submission will be for iOS 6 only. This is strange, because Apple’s own email app gained the rich text editing feature last year in iOS 5.
The fact that the Sparrow crew is working so diligently on an update for its iOS client is actually a bit surprising. When the company was purchased by Google back in July, it gave the impression that it wasn’t going to be doing much with its Mac/iOS products.
At any rate, our fingers are crossed that Apple gives Sparrow’s next update submission the green light. And as always, we’ll let you know as soon as it’s available.