So I come back from holiday to uncover that the Tesco.com R&D team’s first iPhone application to be submitted to the Apple App Store has been rejected!
The letter of rejection was pleasant and helpful, detailing a user-interface reason for the rejection and looking forward to a rapid re-submission.
The Tesco.com R&D ‘Store Finder’ application, which allows iPhone users to locate their nearest Tesco branch, had a problem if the user denied it access to iPhone’s location service so it could not obtain the current latitude and longitude of the phone.
Basically it had been accidentally programmed to have the same attitude as an affronted celebrity denied access to a posh night club (“Don’t you know who I am?”) then give them a ‘stores near me’ list anyway by assuming they were actually located at Tesco.com HQ in Welwyn Garden City!
It’s a minor change (disable the ‘Stores Near Me’ button and switch to the ‘Town/City Search’ screen) so I have to thank the App Store team for their detailed response and their encouraging tone.
It’s no discredit to the developer either – the brief was that the application had to get the customer quickly to the store, so denying the application access to the current location and having to perform a manual search will make the it considerably less ‘immediately’ useful.
It’s some time since I’ve had a letter of rejection so today I will pin it to my local office noticeboard under one of the written tenets of research: “Go Wrong Quickly and you’ll Learn Quickly”.