The app has a growing time line of due-dates, putting the widget on your home screen allows you to avoid the need for alarm/notifications. When switching apps it will be clearly visible what you have coming up or if you have forgotten something.
While waiting many years for someone to build it, I finally gave in and just build it myself. It is such a simple idea, with one clear and obvious goal that I really thought someone else should have built this already. But I found nothing, and since I needed it - I had to build it.
Now there are two questions we need to consider at the same time:
- Is Gentle Reminders a duplicate or too similar to other reminder-apps? Then is it really wrong to reject it?
- Even if Gentle Reminders is too similar to other apps, should appstore review-team decide if it is allowed to exist, or should the market decide?
They are not entirely wrong, there are hundreds of reminder and todo apps out there, and if I was reviewing all of them I would also be hard pressed to see the difference. Especially when you don't care about this specific issue you don't have yourself. That's why appstore review is such a terrible idea. By the very nature of being humans, they can never make the right choice. Apps that spam the store or hide their true functionality will get pass a human reviewer, but when rejecting based on opinion you just won't have the full picture and will not be able to know if that opinion is valid. Only automatic detection should be present, and those have at least a chance to detect nefarious behavior.
The bottom line is that if I want to publish something that Apple see no value in, no matter how pointless or meaningless it might seem to them - I should be able to do it. If they don't want it in their store, allow direct downloads from the web then, problem solved!
Let me hammer in the message for those of you uncertain: Building an app, running a business and doing all the other things needed for this to be possible is a mere side-quest. Fighting the app-store is the big challenge, and that fight never ends. Every update is a risk of capsizing your entire business. This particular app will of course not matter to me personally, it didn't take many hours to make and I can still use it for myself (I've spent more time writing this and fighting app-review than coding). But what about my next idea? Or your idea?
They call the app "spam", claiming that I somehow have downloaded the code from GitHub and just re-uploaded it with a new icon. 🤦🏻♂️ Offensive of course, they try to provoke me into leaving the App Store and go over to Android instead. Similar to many other developers just getting too tired of Apple's attitude, we just want to create great things and see them try their wings, while Apple try to prevent us. Will they succeed?
Anyway you can see for yourself, try out the beta: Testflight link is here