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.

Two of the issues that have been bugging our Darkroom and Darkroom Premium camera apps are the slow photo saving time and the lack of EXIF information, such as geo-tagging, in the saved photos. Of course, there are various factors that could affect the performance and functionality of the application, but the core cause of these problems is in the API provided by Apple to perform such functions.

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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…)

At the moment, iTunes store has no mechanism to provide free trials to users. Developers have three choices to offer similar experience:

• Refund? Actually, there are no refunds allowed on the iTunes store as stated on Apple’s policy. Even though some customers did successfully receive their refund, but some didn’t.
• Offer a limited time free download on your app initially.
• Create separate Free and Paid versions. Free version should have some basic but useful functionality, and hopefully the user will find it useful enough to purchase the paid version with premium features.

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It is quite common to have to display time information in your app, be it the current time, news feed’s creation date, scheduled meeting time or birthday reminders. However, not all of them are displayed the same way and may require different formatting. To do that with Objective-C for iPhone apps, NSDateFormatter is what we need.

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Sales and download analysis is an important task to improve your software and its marketing. I am glad that Apple provides a daily and weekly report on my iPhone App sales. The problem is that they purge the historical data on a regular basis (after 7 days), so it’s important to download and save it to somewhere for later analysis.
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After upgrading to iPhone SDK 2.2, we encountered this error when building one of our projects (others built fine).
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