Streaming Radio app approved

Fast on the heels of the last post, we are pleased to announce that Apple has approved Juggleware’s latest app, Radio Backporch Revolution.

Initially we received a rejection letter from the App Store review team, saying that the app used bandwidth that was demanding on the cell network that was excessive “in Apple’s reasonable judgment.” With a 128kbps mp3 stream, I found this curious as I have used several streaming radio apps that connect to 128kbps streams, including the excellent WFMU app, but also the much higher profile AOL Radio app.

Some google searching revealed this helpful article on StackOverflow wherein the writer related being told verbally by App Store personnel that one megabyte per minute was the maximum allowed. I did some quick math on the calculator and it seemed that my app should be receiving 960KB/minute, so I should be good.  But following the StackOverflow poster’s advice related from Apple staff, I shut off all other notifications and used the Settings app>General>Usage  to reset the statistics and then track the app for 5 minutes. For some reason the app came in as receiving 5.4MB over 5 minutes, which means I was around 10% over the limit.

I am not sure if other 128kbps streams have this issue, or there’s mysterious overhead lurking in mine, but I had planned to knock down the quality to 96k anyway as 128k over 3G still has too many dropouts.

I wrote Apple an email back explaining that it was not an app issue but a stream issue, and I could easily knock the stream down a notch. Which I did, and I got an email saying the status of the app had been changed to “Pending” again. A couple days later, a very congenial Apple developer relations person called me and confirmed the rumor that the limit was indeed 1MB per minute. I said that I had already compressed the stream further and she said they’d rerun the metrics.

It was all very well handled, and to my satisfaction… but the question remains, if the limit for data transfer is a hard number (1MB/min) then why isn’t that written in the developer agreement? Why do they only communicate the details of the rules verbally after the fact? As with the no satire rule, it would would be nice to know what the specifics are in advance.

Backporch Revolution is an artist-run collective and netlabel based in New Orleans that specializes in releasing experimental electronic works by local musicians. The website is backporchrevolution.com

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