I have recently had 3 apps approved for publication through the Amazon with Scoreloop integration using the methodology described here. This has been a learning experience, especially when comparing with the ease of publication through markets such as App Store, Appslib, SlideME, Getjar, Ndoo and Soc.io, but I have always managed to get there after 2-3 weeks of fighting their somewhat sporadic and at times erratic approval procedure.
Today, however, it has become seriously unreasonable, and I have to use my mighty “pen” to fight back! I really do not care if Amazon decides to throw me out of their market… (my games aren’t that popular there anyway)
Lets look at the problem, as described by the Amazon Appstore Account Team:
“Steps to reproduce this issue as it appears in this app: -Click ScoreLoop Icon. -Click the person icon in lower right -click the facebook icon and select facebook -Click Get the Facebook App for Android -Observe it lands on Android market.”
The statement is correct. This will happen. The only problem is, that the “Get the Facebook App for Android” is a link which is part of Facebook’s login page when authenticating using the Facebook API in a webview. There is absolutely no way of authenticating to Facebook connection through a Webview without seeing this!
How can they be so ridiculous? The next step will be banning ads pointing to other app stores than Amazon’s own walled garden! Just to underpin how crazy this is, just know that the game they failed here, was the paid version of Rune Escape Free, which is based on exactly the same code, and therefore also (for obvious reasons) show the link to the Facebook app. That game was approved 4-5 days ago…
I hold up my arms – I give up – This is a lost battle, even for a developer with a PhD in computer science…
I’ve added a solution to this “problem” at http://oster-lundqvist.com/karsten/?p=5118
This is bad news… 🙁 Good luck!
I am curious if scoreloop does things still like this .. whatever. Amazon have their rules concerning links to different markets.
After all, there is just some people who check your app against a list of no-gos and they do not know, where the “no-go” does come from. It appears in your app and therefore they decline your app because it’s against their rules.
I’m also curious, that ads (ie. from admob) are still allowed, because mainly they also point to google play most of the time. I see that the above problem with the facebook app is exactly the same but testing employes just doesn’t know that.
Thank you for pointing the problem and sharing a solution to it, I am sure, it will help many devs!
I know. The rules doesn’t make sense at all. However, I do believe Amazon still have the rules…