Show DEV: Apple rejected my app, so I decided to open-source it
Tags: community, showdev, opensource, swift
Published: 2018-04-16 13:25:47

---
title: Show DEV: Apple rejected my app, so I decided to open-source it
tags: 
- community
- showdev
- opensource
- swift
published: true
description: I invested 51 hours in my app and Apple has rejected it because I used their precious emoji IP. Although this does not make sense to me, there's no value in arguing back with them. So I decided to move on and make my project public to anyone.
---
<img src="https://thiago.ricieri.com/assets/posts/2018/mojilist-screens.jpg" style="width: 100%" alt="Emojilist project sample screens" />

*Originally posted in [my blog](https://thiago.ricieri.com/open-sourcing-my-latest-ios-app). Following the same idea of Show HN, this post is to spread the word to the DEV community.*

Earlier this year, I had the project of creating one new app per month, try to monetize them or run them as a side-project business. I started with the idea to solve a problem that I had.

I wanted a straightforward way to create shopping lists using only emojis. Just that, **only emojis are allowed**. Instead of writing:

```
- Bananas
- Apples
- Cookies
- Meat
- Chicken
- Rice
- ...
```

I wanted a list like this:

```
🍌🍎🍖🍪🍚🍗...
```

Pretty silly, but still fun. [Check out the repository here](http://github.com/thiagoricieri/Mojilist).


## Investing time to make it happen 👨🏻‍💻
I had a fun time creating it, exploring a new project architecture for iOS from scratch and trying out some nice libraries like Realm and Spring. I even calculated the amount of time I invested creating it so I could calculate how much I needed to get in revenue in return by selling it:

App | Hours spent | R$/h | Total Cost
--- | --- | --- | ---
Mojilist | 51 | R$100,00 | R$5,100

## The rejection ☹️
Everything was fine, and I was excited to release, I generated the screenshots needed, and I have sent the binary to Apple for review. My surprise was that the app got rejected because it used Emojis:

<figure>
  <img src="https://thiago.ricieri.com/assets/posts/2018/apple-answer1.png" style="width: 100%" alt="Answer from Apple (1)" />
  <figcaption>
    <small>Answer from Apple (1)</small>
  </figcaption>
</figure>

<figure>
  <img src="https://thiago.ricieri.com/assets/posts/2018/apple-answer2.png" style="width: 100%" alt="Answer from Apple (1)" />
  <figcaption>
    <small>Answer from Apple (2)</small>
  </figcaption>
</figure>

First of all, I was surprised they were enforcing such policy, to me it makes no sense: they already charge a big chunk of any sale in the store (30%), the minimum I expected was to be free to use at the emojis they have popularized throughout their platform. It's not like they wouldn't get paid for it 🤷‍♂️

## Open-sourcing the project
Personal opinions aside, I would need to draw many icons to get the chance of resubmitting it, and I think my time would be better invested in other stuff (like learning Node.js, React.js or creating another app **that does not use emojis 😡**). So I decided to open source this project to get community feedback and perhaps create something else from it. Maybe it could be a good starter for junior developers to try to understand how to build an app from scratch.

Unfortunately, I had to remove the iconography I used, as it is copyrighted. But other than that, the rest is distributed under Apache 2.0 license. [Enjoy by checking out the repository at GitHub](http://github.com/thiagoricieri/Mojilist) and [let me know what you think](https://twitter.com/thiagoricieri)!