UPDATE (9/19/2009) – Darkroom Premium (v.2.3) has finally been approved by Apple and it’s available now in the iTunes Store. So update now! Darkroom Standard, on the other hand, is still awaiting approval from Apple.

Due to the number of support questions regarding Darkroom and OS 3.0 support in the past week, it seems many are still unaware of why Darkroom is not compatible with OS 3.0. Therefore, I have created this blog post for your use. We will to respond to everyone’s general OS 3.0 support concerns via the comments, but if you want to address us privately, you can certainly do so by emailing us.

Here’s the complete rundown of what’s been happening:

• Current versions of Darkroom and Darkroom Premium are NOT compatible with OS 3.0.
• We have an OS 3.0 compatible version but Apple has repeatedly rejected it because we use a custom camera interface. They have approved it in the past, but have since stopped and claims we are using an undocumented API to achieve the interface.  In other words, we are at a standstill with Apple.
• If we strip it down to comply with Apple, Darkroom will be no different than default Camera app.
• Other photo apps that uses a custom camera interface are also having the same problems with getting approved.
• We have not been updated by Apple of any changes in developer guidelines that would result in this situation.

Additionally, this past weekend, we noticed Apple has approved a photo app that uses a custom camera interface, Real Cam LE. So, this could be a sign that Darkroom is in line for approval or Apple has some serious issues with their apps approval team, as many have suggested.

So, if the approval action for the photo app mentioned above is not flawed, you could still see Darkroom make a comeback to your iPhones. For now though, we’ve done as much as we could on our end and it’s not resulting in any response from Apple. What we suggest is for you, our users, to contact Apple directly either by their iTunes feedback form or by phone and express your concerns about this matter.

We have cross post this entry into our Support Forum. You may choose to leave your comments in our support forum as well.

For those who are not familiar with iPhone development, Apple recently required that all iPhone apps be compatible with their upcoming iPhone OS 3.0, otherwise, they would be rejected from the App store. As our current Darkroom version is not OS 3.0 compliant and together with an increasing number of users questioning the lack of support for OS 3.0 beta, we submitted an updated Darkroom to include just the support for OS 3.0 beta to Apple.

For some reason or another, our latest update was rejected. We are scratching our heads here because we updated Darkroom so it can support OS 3.0. But after reading the email from Apple, it was not an issue with OS compatibility, rather it was an issue with us modifying or extending an undocumented API. Say what?!

The fact is, we have always been using their published APIs when developing Darkroom. Sure, we need to transverse into camera’s subviews and access the button event control programatically to delay the shutter action (so that we can check the steadiness of the device), but we only use published API (UIControl’s API) to accomplish that. Therefore this certainly complies with iPhone SDK Agreement section 3.3.1. All core features of Darkroom, such as steady mode, timer mode, and full screen shutter mode require an extra interface for the camera. Otherwise, such functions will not work if it’s not for the custom interface.

Apple has been approving this since we started developing Darkroom, but why this sudden rejection? We believe that other camera apps, such as Night Camera, CameraKit, Camera Zoom, QuadCamera, ProCamera, CameraBag, Pano, Fast Tap Camera, Self-Portrait and many others are also using this method to create their own camera interface as well.

We’d understand if Apple decides to reject apps when they first make their way to the app store, but when our existing app is updated specifically to meet Apple’s new policy (OS 3.0 support) and it gets rejected, we see discrepancies in their approval process and it’s misleading developers. Ultimately though, users and especially the paying customers will no longer have access to the functionalities which they paid for.

Are you a iPhone app developer? Feel free to comment if you have had similar issues with Apple’s approval process?

UPDATE: The issue has been fixed by Apple. Please read below for the latest update and instruction.

The new version of Darkroom 2.2 was officially approved by Apple on 8th April. However after several hours of the release, we received floods of support queries. Users reported that they could not update their copy. When the user tries to update the application through iTunes and sync it to iPhone, iTunes returns an error message, “The application “Darkroom” was not installed on the iPhone because it could not be verified.”

We took immediate action to make sure this is not the binary problem that we submitted, and it should not be the case. First, the testing indicates that we do not have any problems on the Darkroom Premium, which was approved several days before the regular version. Both Darkroom Premium and Darkroom were generated from the same codebase (with different features activated). Plus the binaries were signed properly, otherwise iTunes Connect would not have accepted them. Second, this error occurs before the runtime, when verifying the application binary from iTunes store. (more…)