App Store developers now have another reason to hate Apple 😛 Apparently Apple is not allowing them to give away promo codes for apps that are rated as 17+. A developer can normally give away 50 promo codes for any app published on the iTunes AppStore. These promo codes are given away by developers to blogs / review sites, in contests etc. Not being able to issue these codes surely means losing out on a lot of coverage for these developers. With over 100000 developers and 65000 apps live on the App Store, developers surely need to ensure that they get good coverage.
Ever since, the parental control for all App Store apps has gone live with iPhone 3.0, all apps are rated as per age limits. These 17+ apps are not just adult apps or the ones with high violence, but any app “that feature an embedded web browser or provide access to 3rd party content also automatically require the 17+ rating, regardless of the application’s content or intended audience.”
As per TUAW the problem is that iPhone 3.0 firmware not the iTunes show a mature content warning when using a promo code for 17+ apps. Though we are sure that Apple would come out with a fix in the next release of iTunes and the iPhone firmware, till then the developers have to find alternative ways of giving away test apps (we really hope they find a way for us 😉 ).
The iPhone Help
The iPhone Help