It should be about both: Following your distributor's rules and providing the good user experience of an app that doesn't immediately demand a login when you launch it.
Back when I was working at an iOS developer, our leadership brain trust decided that the next version of our app should require the user to log in, or sign up for an account, and not let the user move forward unless they did so. I advised against this because, 1. Apple generally forbids the practice, 2. It's an unnecessary roadblock to getting into the app (having an account provided optional benefits), and 3. The engineering effort, plus the effort to rework later once Apple rejects it, was not worth it. I was unconvincing, so we did the work, submitted to the App Store, and lo and behold, it was rejected, and we had to scramble to re-work a "skip the login" function (in 6 point gray-on-black text) link into the flow. sigh
This was almost a decade ago. I guess my point is that this whole episode, fair or not, was totally predictable and avoidable. I bet that Hey had engineers internally shouting for the hills to not do this, who were being ignored. Maybe the company's leadership just wanted to pick a fight with Apple. Who would want to start such a fight, I don't know? If you're not a behemoth then there are only two possible ways that fight ends: 1. tears and engineering re-work, or 2. App Store banishment. It's just not worth it. Or maybe it is worth it if you're an exec and it's not your time being wasted but some poor engineer working over the weekend to scramble for a fix.
Back when I was working at an iOS developer, our leadership brain trust decided that the next version of our app should require the user to log in, or sign up for an account, and not let the user move forward unless they did so. I advised against this because, 1. Apple generally forbids the practice, 2. It's an unnecessary roadblock to getting into the app (having an account provided optional benefits), and 3. The engineering effort, plus the effort to rework later once Apple rejects it, was not worth it. I was unconvincing, so we did the work, submitted to the App Store, and lo and behold, it was rejected, and we had to scramble to re-work a "skip the login" function (in 6 point gray-on-black text) link into the flow. sigh
This was almost a decade ago. I guess my point is that this whole episode, fair or not, was totally predictable and avoidable. I bet that Hey had engineers internally shouting for the hills to not do this, who were being ignored. Maybe the company's leadership just wanted to pick a fight with Apple. Who would want to start such a fight, I don't know? If you're not a behemoth then there are only two possible ways that fight ends: 1. tears and engineering re-work, or 2. App Store banishment. It's just not worth it. Or maybe it is worth it if you're an exec and it's not your time being wasted but some poor engineer working over the weekend to scramble for a fix.