A Rejection on the Eve of Launch

Patatap unfortunately will not be coming to the Vision Pro in the foreseeable future.

In August last year I teased out a preview of Patatap for Apple’s Vision Pro. At the beginning of this year, things were look going of successfully porting all of the features to the Vision Pro. Unfortunately, when the headset launched last month Patatap was not eligible to be included in the VisionOS App Store. This month’s post expands on why and my assessment of the experience.

First and foremost: why is it not eligible? This is due to Apple’s privacy policy on applications that are categorized as “Made for Kids”. In the App Store dashboard Apple says, “Apps that are Made for Kids cannot be available on visionOS.” This designation persists for any application that has or once had the category “Made for Kids”. Not surprisingly, Patatap falls into this category. As detailed on Apple’s developer page, Patatap conforms to strict standards of data privacy making it eligible for the “Made for Kids” category. While this categorization was assigned by me, it was at a time when Apple foreclosed no drawbacks to including your app into this category.

Why did you designate the app “Made for Kids”? In 2014 when I released the Patatap mobile app there was no Vision Pro, no VisionOS. In fact, there were just over 1M apps in the App Store. It is my belief that Apple wanted to increase its portfolio of apps suitable to children. When I went through distributing Patatap, I was presented with an option to add “Made for Kids”. If I conformed to the standards described above, then my application could be included and bundled to be sold in a special category. At the time, that sounded like a great idea. To me, it still seems like a great idea. Patatap is an app made for anyone. So the idea of expanding inclusion made sense to me.

Clearly, I did not read the fine print. Fast forward to today and the “Made for Kids” category is exclusionary. It disqualifies an app from being distributed to VisionOS. I worked with an Apple representative some days after the release of the Vision Pro to remedy the problem. I tried recategorizing the app. Currently, if you look at Patatap on the App Store you will see it does not have the “Made for Kids” designation. It is, however rated as suitable for “Ages 4+”. To my dismay, changing the category did not fix the problem. The representative recommended that I publish an entirely new application like “Patatap VisionOS”. For me, that erodes trust to the thousands of people that have already paid for the existing Patatap app.

So, for the 10 year anniversary of Patatap I am regrettably announcing that Patatap will not be available for Vision Pro. While this journey has by no means been catastrophic, it does underscore the concerns of federal and international governments with Apple and other large technology companies. When does one entity, organization, or person (in this case Apple) wield too much power? At what point does that undermine innovation, commerce, or culture? I do not have any answers or specific points of view on these questions. I do, however, firmly believe that the web is the most equitable and open space for artistic expression. Most of my artistic digital work exists there and has for over a decade now. I hope, want, and continue to support this through foreseeable future.

If you would like me to write about how the web is a more equitable and open space for artistic expression, or how I plan to commit to it. Let me know and I can add it to my list of topics to discuss in this newsletter.

—Jono