Gotchas while Appifying your website in Android with Webview

Android's Webview class is an excellent way to convert your website instantly into an app provided it is responsive. There are a lot of tutorials out there to convert your website into a webview instantly. I too wanted to convert one of my websites into an app.

However, there are certain things you need to keep in mind before you go ahead and submit in the app store for publication.

Since this is a relatively newer experience for me, I did not anticipate certain obvious gotchas. My application went through two sets of rejection before I could make it live, perhaps these could be useful for someone in similar waters.

Ensure that you are aware of all the policies that are set forth by Google Play; may it be copyrighted content, Privacy policy, Impersonation Policy, Ratings etc., I thought I had it all covered until I got this email from Google assuming that my application was an impersonation of an existing website.

Rejection#1

Notification from Google Play

Google Play Support <googleplay-developer-support+no-reply@google.com>

Hi Developers at ***,

After review, <may app>, has been suspended and removed from Google Play as a policy strike because it violates the impersonation policy.

Next Steps

1. Read through the Impersonation article for more details and examples of policy violations.
2. Make sure your app is compliant with the Impersonation and Intellectual Property policy and all other policies listed in the Developer Program Policies. Remember additional enforcement could occur if there are further policy issues with your apps.
3. Sign in to your Developer Console and submit the policy compliant app using a new package name and a new app name.

What if I have permission to use the content?

Contact our support team to provide a justification for its use. Justification may include providing proof that you are authorized to use the content in your app or some other legal justification.

Additional suspensions of any nature may result in the termination of your developer account, and investigation and possible termination of related Google accounts. If your account is terminated, payments will cease and Google may recover the proceeds of any past sales and/or the cost of any associated fees (such as chargebacks and transaction fees) from you.

If you’ve reviewed the policy and feel this suspension may have been in error, please reach out to our policy support team. One of my colleagues will get back to you within 2 business days.

Regards,

The Google Play Review Team

My Appeal

My initial reaction was wtf! I have created an application for my own website, why the hell would google want to reject it? But the rationale behind this rejection made sense. What if a random person uses my website and tries to monetize my application? Or myself for that matter take a bunch of existing websites and start appifying them for my personal benefits.
I appealed. During the appeal, I uploaded a bunch of documents supporting that I am the owner of the website and that I have the rights to appify. The documents included - Google Analytics statistics page of the site and the Digital Ocean hosted app screenshots. Plus a small write up on claiming myself to be the owner.

Google understood and accepted my appeal. This is the email I got from them afterward.

Reinstatement

Re: [<my case#>] Your appeal for reinstatement

Hi Bragadeesh,

Thanks for contacting the Google Play Team.

We’ve accepted your appeal and your app <appname> has been reinstated. For the app to appear on the Play Store, you’ll need to sign into your Developer Console and click "Submit update" to submit your app again.

If the option to resubmit is not available, please make a small change (such as adding and deleting a space in your Description in the Store Listings) to reactivate the button.

In the future, if you have proof of permission you can submit it to our team proactively using this form:
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/6320428

The link can also be found on your Store Listing page underneath the box for Full Description.

If you're an AdMob publisher, you'll need to contact the AdMob team to re-enable ad serving:
https://support.google.com/admob/contact/appeal_policy_violation

The AdMob policy team will review your app(s) and decide whether to re-enable ad serving.

Please let me know if you have any other questions or concerns.

Thanks for supporting Google Play!

Regards,
<Google Engineer>
The Google Play Team

At this point, I was elated to have successfully appealed to my rejection and went ahead and resubmitted the application. However, later I found that, this feeling was short lived as I got a second rejection from Google Playstore.

Rejection#2

Notification from Google Play about <app name>

Hi Developers at ***,

Thanks for submitting your app to Google Play.

I reviewed <appname>, and had to reject it because of an unauthorized use of copyrighted content. If you submitted an update, the previous version of your app is still live on Google Play.

Here’s how you can submit your app for another review:

1. Remove any content owned by a third party from your app. For example, your app Store Listing contains: images of “<a celebrity>” in the Tablet 7" Screenshots. Affected Translations: en_US, en_IN
2. Read through the Unauthorized Use of Copyrighted Content article for more details and examples.
3. Make sure your app is compliant with the Impersonation and Intellectual Property policy and all other policies listed in the Developer Program Policies. Remember that additional enforcement could occur if there are further policy issues with your apps.
4. Sign in to your Developer Console and submit your app.

What if I have permission to use the content?

Contact our support team to provide a justification for its use. Justification may include providing proof that you are authorized to use the content in your app or some other legal justification.

If you’ve reviewed the policy and feel this rejection may have been in error, please reach out to our policy support team. One of my colleagues will get back to you within 2 business days.

I appreciate your support of Google Play!

Best,

<Google Engineer>

Google Play Review Team

This rejection though was totally valid. I felt so dumb to have used a celebrity picture for demonstration purposes in one of my tablet screenshots without a copyright. Google was sort of kinder and patient to me. In order, not to test their patience too much, I thought I would remove the image in question they've said and three other images as well which I thought would fall under the violative category. 

I then resubmitted my application and voila! My app is now live at the play store. It was an adventurous learning because they could have blocked my entire developer account for life if I had one or two more policy strikes as many other developers have had. 

Cheers!

Braga

iPhone application tutorial - Body Mass Index Calculator : Part 7

The first posting's output and this may vary since that was developed with XCode 3 and this one with XCode 4. There are slight differences between both of them, but that we don't want to know. You can download XCode 4 for $5 from Apple's website.

I wanted to keep this final section very light. Hence going to show only the output here. :)

Click here to download the entire source code for this project. It is free to develop and distribute. Hope you guys learnt something.

Cheers!!
Braga

iPhone application tutorial - Body Mass Index Calculator : Part 6

This is our last part of the tutorial. We have done whatever that needs to be done with respect to the UI. All that is left is the coding part. In the last post, you would have seen that we had a couple of methods defined called as updateResult() and range(). These are supposed to be private methods. But then, I don't want to overload the readers with that concept yet, hence I have not set the access modifier for them. They will come in handy in our implementation part.

The implementation part involves responding to the actions that are sent from the UI. Lets take a look at the implementation of the height slider and go line by line.

The first line is nothing but a copy of the method declaration. The return type of the this method is an IBAction. The argument that it takes is the sender's object. If you had known Java, 'id' is a data type similar to Object. It is the sender's object. Since we have attached this method with the Slider, this would be the Slider itself.

On the fist line inside the method, we are typecasting the sender to the UISlider since we know for sure that the sender is an instance of UISlider. We then get its value, asssign it to a NSString variable followed by assigning it to the height text. Since we have allocated the NSString we should release it. You could notice there is a tiny little call to updateResults. It is nothing but updating the BMI and the Result at the bottom. Its implemenation is,

The above code is self explanatory and straightforward to read. We also need to add a similar slider method for weight as we did for height.

Whoof thats a lotta coding. Lets see the final output in the final part of this tutorial!

Cheers!
Braga

iPhone application tutorial - Body Mass Index Calculator : Part 5

In the past section we saw how to design the view and set the basic things up. Now, its time to do some coding. Before that, to check whether everything are Ok, press the ⌘ + B button to build your project. It may prompt you to save the project. If it does, click the Save button. The build should succeed at this point. If it fails, then go and check the logs or tell me the error in the comments section, I would surely help you out!

Now, back to business. We need to dynamically update the values in the UI. To attach this with the code, we have a binding object defined called as IBOutlet. Using this object, we would be able to set stuff in the code and see it change in the UI. Looks magic. To start binding the UI components and the code. Click on the Editor icon the right top side to see both the Interface Builder and the Interface file side by side.

Select your component on the UI - the height label. Hold down the control key and draw a line from the component to the Interface definition, you should be seeing a line coming up automatically for it to be inserted as shown below.

Lets name that IBOutlet variable to be height. Do the same for weight, bmi and the result labels. So, we are done with defining our binding variables namely the IBOutlet. Now whatever change you do for these outlets will now be reflected in the UI. We have one more thing left from the hooking up perspective - the Sliders. We need to assign an action when we slide the height and weight sliders. It is pretty simple. Select the height slider, choose the properties from the side and click on the Value changed option and drag it to the interface code. All you should be naming here is the method name which would be height slider. Note, you do not need to press Control key as we did for the Outlets.

You would need to add a couple of more methods in your interface file. The final code would look something like the following


Cheers!
Braga

iPhone application tutorial - Body Mass Index Calculator : Part 4

Welcome to the part4 of the BMI Calculator iPhone application tutorial. We saw in the last section on how to set components on the UI. I had said that there was a small thing mentioned about the slider.

Before I tell more about it. Lets strategize how our application should behave. You slide two things in your application namely the heights and weights, the user will be seeing his body mass index calculated and will be given the result on whether he is normal or underweight or obese etc. We will be needing to determine the upper and lower bounds of the heights and weights. I have taken the height range as 120-210 cm and the weight range as 30-130 kg.

Whenever you click on any component, it corresponding property should be appearing at the right hand panel. Go ahead and click on the height slider. Set the minimum and maximum values of the slider as we discussed before.

You would also need to set the initial value. Since it needs to be in the center, set the height as 165 (average of 120 and 210). Same you would need to do by selecting the weight slider. 30-130 as lower upper bounds with 80 as the current value.

Thats it we are done designing our wonderful UI for the iPhone Application. We have some UI-Code hookup and some coding left before we declare our application is complete which we will be doing in the coming posts.

Cheers!
Braga

iPhone application tutorial - Body Mass Index Calculator : Part 3

Welcome to the part 3 of the tutorial. You could be thinking, "what the hell did I learn in Part 2?" Well. Lets take one baby step at a time. The second part of the tutorial's project name read "Body Mass Index Calculator". But then I had to change it to helloworldXcode, the name would not mind much, but whatever you choose, choose it wiser.

On the left hand top side of the you should be able to see your project. Expand it and you should be seeing your interface file (.h), Implementation file (.m) and the UI file (.xib). Clicking on any of these will bring up the corresponding code or UI on the main panel.

Go ahead and select the .xib ViewController file. You should now see an empty Canvas appearing on the center of the editor where you can drag and drop stuff. For our body mass index we need few UILabels that are going to be static and few UILabels that are going to change dynamically on the user action.
For dragging and dropping components on to the View you should select the Object from the drop down on the right hand side bottom corner as shown below.

We also will need a couple of slider for selecting the height and weight. Already sounds cool eh? Here is a screenshot on what stuff you should be dragging and dropping on the center of the editor.

After dropping the elements which includes totally 9 labels and two sliders you should be aligning them like shown in the following screenshot. The placement of the labels depends totally on your imagination and creativity, but lets make it professional looking so that our application should sell at least a million times in the App store. That was a joke :)

You could notice that changing the names of the labels are very simple. Just double click on it and start typing as shown in the above screenshot. With this your basic set up of the view is complete, we just have a few more things left regarding the slider functionality, but we will cover it in the next section.

Cheers,
Braga

iPhone application tutorial - Body Mass Index Calculator : Part 2

Welcome to the second part of the BMI Calculator Application for iPhone tutorial. I assume that you have XCode installed in your mac or Mac under VMWare. Launch XCode and select a new View based project.

Click on Next. Fill up the basic details and move on.

Once you have selected where to save your project, you should see something like this. Note: We are using Xcode 4 to develop this application, the view may vary from the previous version of Xcodes.

Thats it in this part of the tutorial. Lets start using the Interface builder and do some coding in the coming posts.

Cheers,
Braga

iPhone application tutorial - Body Mass Index Calculator : Part 1

After an extensive learning on Objective C and covering the basics of iPhone development, I wanted to get my hands dirty with a working application. Following the concept of Minimal Marketable Subset, I thought I would develop a very primitive Body Mass Index calculator. Ok, into business

Our Final BMI Calculator Application is going to look like this.

Prerequisities

Since this is a very narrow development environment (yes you cannot develop this with windows), I would want to give a brief on what you will need, both hardware and software. First of all, you would need a Macbook or a Macbook Pro. A basic Macbook would do. Its based on how far you go. If you are very serious into iPhone development, then I would recommend you get a Macbook Pro. On the software side, you would need the XCode development suite. You can get it from Apple's website, it is free to download. It asks you to create an Apple Id. Go to youtube or google, you should find tons of resources there.

If you want to create clean iPhone Applications, you should have a very strong C Programming Background. And it would be nice if you are familiar with Object Oriented Concepts. You would need to learn Objective C basics and then the basics of iPhone development. Believe me, those links are simply too good. You can learn them both in just a day if you are freak like me.

Armed up with these basics, we can dive into the tutorial right away from the next post.

Cheers,
Braga