Don McAl­lis­ter, whom I inter­viewed on my pod­cast Wel­come to the Inter­net, runs a Mac app train­ing and tuto­r­ial busi­ness called Screen­Cast­sOn­line where you can sub­scribe to (or buy indi­vid­ual) videos that detail what a par­tic­u­lar Mac App might do.

Recently he devel­oped a series of iPhone/​iPad and Mac apps that took his train­ing videos and moved them onto the two App Stores as a series of excel­lent apps devoted to teach­ing and inform­ing, in par­tic­u­lar, new Mac users about the wealth of great soft­ware avail­able on the Mac and iOS platforms.

Screen­shots of SCO­tu­tor for Mac

Apple’s Sh*t Sand­wich ¹

Here’s the thing with the App Stores. Apple giveth and can taketh away. Don’s apps were hap­pily in the App Store for a while, help­ing him recoup devel­op­ment costs and ris­ing up the var­i­ous sales charts. He posted an arti­cle last night detail­ing all that has gone on with his apps in the two App Stores:

Once I had recouped the orig­i­nal devel­op­ment and design costs, I made two titles free; “SCO­tu­tor for iPad” and “SCO­tu­tor for Mac”. These were aimed at brand new users of the iPad and Mac and were extremely pop­u­lar, obvi­ously even more so once I’d made them free, both reach­ing the top of the free Edu­ca­tion charts. Each app has sev­eral hours of top qual­ity edu­ca­tion and were also unique, in that they were the only apps in the iOS App store with closed cap­tions for accessibility.

This week Don’s iOS based SCO­tu­tor apps have been pulled/​rejected by Apple because they pri­mar­ily con­tain a movie and as such should be sub­mit­ted to the iTunes Store’s movie sec­tion — which is next to impos­si­ble for the aver­age user to do because of the restric­tions on submission:

As a side note, it’s impos­si­ble for me (or any other inde­pen­dent video trainer) to reg­is­ter to sell video tuto­ri­als directly in the iTunes store as sug­gested in the rejec­tion state­ment, as I do not meet the require­ments of “5 feature-​​length movies or doc­u­men­taries that were released the­atri­cally (or) 100 feature-​​length movies or doc­u­men­taries that were either released the­atri­cally or direct to video.”

As you can read in his blog post, Don’s tried var­i­ous ways of adding more fea­tures to his apps (adding chap­ter mark­ers, note tak­ing, les­son lists) all at a cost to him in an attempt to appease the App Store review­ers, to no avail.

It’s really too bad that Apple is han­dling Don’s sit­u­a­tion this way, par­tic­u­larly when:

despite this rul­ing a search for “video tutor” on the iOS App Store reveals 60 iPhone Apps and 50 iPad Apps are still avail­able for sale on the iOS App Store.

Don’s really one of the good guys that Apple should be encour­ag­ing, help­ing and pro­mot­ing. He does so much work help­ing and devel­op­ing resources for new Mac & iOS users to ease their tran­si­tion to the plat­forms — they should really just buy his videos and include them for free along with a new Mac purchase.

Instead they’re push­ing him out and mak­ing him spend valu­able time fight­ing with opaque App Store rules.