Some time ago we did an iPhone application for stranded travelers. Our idea was: your plan fell through and you need an hotel near you and now. We already had the info, so we packaged it for the iPhone and our first application was born. Soon we got request to let the user select a place different from their current location. We thought this was just logical. But how to have the user select a location easily that respect what we do on SeeYourHotel? We certainly don’t want to go back to 1997 and list hundreds of hotels for a whole city when most people have a much clearer idea of the place where they want to stay.
We thought about it and showing the hotels on the map was the way to go. We can’t help it, we love Google Maps so much, and it is already on the phone so why not use it. We read a bit on the web and saw that maybe Apple would not be very cool about us using Google Maps. Nonetheless we decided to try it, with a simple first function of showing the hotels around the current location. It worked very well, we were happy and we submitted the update. What we read was true, Apple doesn’t like for developers to use non-published API, so our application was rejected.
I wonder if it is really Apple’s fault in this case, on Android we could use Google Maps all we want and Google would be really OK with it, but not so on the iPhone. Is it Google that doesn’t want the maps feature already available on the iPhone to be inaccessible or is it Apple? So now we have to look for alternative mapping solution on the iPhone. I wonder why after letting everybody see in their ads how fabulous the integration of Google Maps on the iPhone was, they don’t let developers push it even farther?
