Some of the devs on my Twitter feed have started complaining about the Mac App Store approvals process. Like the equivalent for iOS, it’s down to Apple what makes the store and what doesn’t, and mistakes are already being made.

The latest victim is LittleIpsum, an application that provides a quick and easy way to copy ‘lipsum’ text to the clipboard; while not something every Mac owner needs, dummy text is used by most designers at some point, and this seems the kind of 59p app that would work very nicely in a Mac App Store, but that would be pointless from an admin/infrastructure standpoint elsewhere.

Apple’s response is that LittleIpsum does not meet the following guideline:

2.8   Apps that are not very useful or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected

What’s ‘not useful’ or doesn’t provide ‘lasting entertainment value’ is subjective and is the heart of the problem with the approvals process. Myriad games I’ve reviewed for iOS offer zero lasting entertainment value, yet the iOS App Store is littered with the things. And yet here is a Mac app that clearly has both a use and an audience being rejected, presumably because some poor sod at Apple is reviewing dozens of apps per hour and didn’t get why the app might be handy to have if you’re a designer.