Friday 18 September 2009

Letter of Rejection

So I come back from holiday to uncover that the Tesco.com R&D team’s first iPhone application to be submitted to the Apple App Store has been rejected!

The letter of rejection was pleasant and helpful, detailing a user-interface reason for the rejection and looking forward to a rapid re-submission.

The Tesco.com R&D 'Store Finder' application, which allows iPhone users to locate their nearest Tesco branch, had a problem if the user denied it access to iPhone’s location service so it could not obtain the current latitude and longitude of the phone.

Basically it had been accidentally programmed to have the same attitude as an affronted celebrity denied access to a posh night club (“Don’t you know who I am?”) then give them a ‘stores near me’ list anyway by assuming they were actually located at Tesco.com HQ in Welwyn Garden City!

It’s a minor change (disable the ‘Stores Near Me’ button and switch to the ‘Town/City Search’ screen) so I have to thank the App Store team for their detailed response and their encouraging tone.

It’s no discredit to the developer either - the brief was that the application had to get the customer quickly to the store, so denying the application access to the current location and having to perform a manual search will make the it considerably less ‘immediately’ useful.

It’s some time since I’ve had a letter of rejection so today I will pin it to my local office noticeboard under one of the written tenets of research: “Go Wrong Quickly and you’ll Learn Quickly”.

4 comments:

  1. So looking forward to the iphone App.
    Might buy the missus an Iphone then :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Nick,

    Do you have a store finder API or maybe a table of stores? I'm playing around with Android/Gears, may have an interesting idea in mind.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Nick
    Yes.. please develop an Android version of this! The Android market is growing rapidly, iPhones are 'now' and high profile enough no doubt for you to peruade your bosses this was a good idea. I'm sure it will be succesful and maybe you can move to Android then? - these phones will outsell iPhones in the next year or two.
    http://www.brighthand.com/default.asp?newsID=15744&news=Android+iPhone+Windows+Mobile+BlackBerry+webOS

    ReplyDelete
  4. Pretty much right about Android taking market share, got the T-mobile pulse mini this morning (I was looking here for a tesco android app)
    With quidco cashback £10, and taking out airtime - this cost £70 pay as you go, from t-mobile - that's right no contract, £70.
    It has touch screen (resistive but works well), wifi, 3g, GPS, Android 2.1 accelerometer and it works a treat, just installed Opera Mini 5 for Android using my work wifi. Love it.

    A Jarvis

    ReplyDelete

As this blog grows in readership - and because it carries the Tesco brand - I have had to become more careful about the sort of comments that are acceptable. The good news is that I'm a champion of free speech so please be as praising or as critical as you wish! The only comments I DON'T allow through are:

1. Comments which criticise an individual other than myself, or are critical of an organisation other than Tesco. This is simply because they cannot defend themselves so is unfair and possibly libellous. Comments about some aspect of Tesco being better/worse than another equivalent organisation are allowed as long as you start by saying "in my personal opinion.." or "I think that...". ... followed by a "...because.." and some reasoned argument.

2. Comments which are totally unrelated to the context of the original article. If I have written about a mobile app and you start complaining about the price of potatoes then your comment isn't going stay for long!

3. Advertising / web links / spam.

4. Insulting / obscene messages.


Ok, rules done - now it's your go: