CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ios
akshay22
akshay22

Reputation: 21

Publish two similar iPhone apps on AppStore to support customers using two distinct version of my web application

I have my enterprise application (intranet web application) released long back.
I also have an iPhone app on AppStore to provide some essential web application functionalities on mobile. This iPhone app runs against the webapis exposed by this web application and is strongly dependent on it.

I have recently released a new version of my web application which is substantially different from the previous version (technically) and is a major release.
Although it caters to the same business functionality.
When I say a major release I mean the entities, signalR version etc are totally incompatible with the previous one.

Now I have to release a mobile app similar to the one I already have on AppStore but running against the new webapis exposed by the new version of webapplication.

I have to keep on supporting Clients using both of the versions of my enterprise application and cannot have a single iPhone app catering to both due to the strong incompatibility between the two versions of the webapplication.

But going through the Apple Developer site I found below

App Store Review Guidelines 2.20 Developers "spamming" the App Store with many versions of similar apps will be removed from the iOS Developer Program

I am really confused in releasing the new app which is similar to the previous one but

Please help me as I am clueless on this.

Note: I have already gone through all the related posts on publishing similar iOS Apps but somehow didn't receive any inputs on this specific case.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 319

Answers (1)

Tobi Nary
Tobi Nary

Reputation: 4596

While it would be preferable from an OOP point of view - if the UI and UX of both apps are the same - to allow the app's user (or the app itself) to select the correct data provider w.r.t. your web application's version, e.g. have interchangeable implementations that yield the same results depending on the backend, your approach might not be considered 'spamming' the store.

That guideline is intended to hold back developers just changing assets and names of apps (mostly games) and release basically the same codebase 100 times, maximizing efficiency and getting promoted as 'new app' regulary.

Seeing as you already made the conceptually bad decission to develop two different apps, submit both (or seeing as the old one might already be in the store, the new one) and see what review says; there's no harm in trying.

Upvotes: 1

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