At the mercy of a platform

Editor’s note:  This is a guest post from Stacey Brucia, commonly known at The Hodges Partnership as “employee number one.”  Stacey works for THP in Seattle.  We blame her husband for that.

Usually, my gripes about Apple are purely personal – and from the typical consumer standpoint:  Husband calls.  Speak for two minutes.  Dropped call.  Repeat.  (Until we got so frustrated here in Seattle that he has now switched back to Verizon, and our Apple love is restricted to the coveted iPad.)

But in working with one of our newer clients this week, I was reminded that as great as technology and social marketing can be, your particular product or consumer offering can only be as good as the platform you’re working with…and in the end, you don’t have total control.  Far from it, actually.

Some background: Barefoot Explorers, an independent, iPhone game studio I’m working with – shameless plug for Panda Hero, which reached No. 4 in paid Kids’ Games in the app store this spring – is built on a Play2Plant model.  The theory is that people are going to play iPhone games anyway, so why not help them help the Earth and be environmentally responsible at the same time?  For every paid game downloaded, Barefoot Explorers plants trees through its partnership for Trees for the Future.  Just this week, the game studio run by husband-and-wife team Jacques and Jodi Ropert made its contribution for Panda Hero’s launch, over 20,000 trees.  And this quick accomplishment was partly made possible because Panda Hero was featured as “New & Noteworthy” in the app store, quite a feat among all the apps released each day.

But things were going too smoothly.

Apple rejected Barefoot Explorer’s second game this weekend, this time a casual arcade game for players of all ages, DreamScape.  The controversy?  Well, trying to be a good citizen, I suppose.

Since Panda Hero launched in April, Apple has changed its policy, and says it cannot be responsible for making sure that nonprofits receive the donations a paid app helps foster, either because customers are directly making that payment or the developer is doing so on their behalf, as is the case with Barefoot Explorers.  More about that here on Mashable.  And so, app developers cannot mention donations within app store descriptions or within an app itself.

And yes, I get the fact that Apple has to make some blanket policies because it cannot easily police all of its apps or deal with potentially irate customers who end up dealing with unscrupulous charities.  I’m not arguing its decision.  Frustrated for my client and wondering why doing some good is so complicated, yes.

For now, this is another lesson learned in rolling with the punches.  Credit to Barefoot Explorers for quickly re-writing its app store description so that it was vague enough to please Apple but still inspiring to potential customers who would like to spend $0.99, play a fun game and plant a tree (oh, wait, they can’t say “tree.”)  That’s the short-term solution that was needed to get DreamScape out the door on schedule.

For now, I’m just glad I can still talk about the tree-planting efforts in all of my pitches.  And if you want to help plant one directly, download Panda Hero with your kids or play DreamScape yourself.