Angelo DiNardi

I’ve received a number of requests for the source code of MailWrangler over the past year. Recently I finally spent the time to prepare and post it to github. Sadly I was unable to actually import it from SVN due to the repository being corrupted and not having a complete backup. I simply imported my most recent checkout of the code in to git, and pushed that. Not my first choice, but it works.

I’ve licensed MailWrangler under the Apache 2.0 License. It’s a little more restrictive of a license than my other projects, but it is also much more “popular” of a project than my others. I have no idea if anyone will really care — but hey, maybe someone will. I don’t have much intention to personally do much with the project going forward (a big part of me just letting it out in to the wild). I’m more than willing to accept patches and merge forks back in to the project and keep the code on github up to date from others. I suppose it could be a decent alternative gmail “client” for those of us with developer licenses.

The thing to note about the current state of the code is that it doesn’t really work. I wrote it for the first SDK released by Apple and never updated it. An update at some point broke some parts of it, namely being able to add an account. If anyone fixes it I’ll be glad to patch up my copy of it for others.

Enjoy.

http://github.com/adinardi/mailwrangler

So lately I’ve been getting contacted a lot about MailWrangler. I have no idea why all of a sudden there’s renewed interest from users and journalists. I haven’t had time to respond to most people, sadly, but I’ll address some things here for everyone.

First off, chances are good I’ll never release MailWrangler. Originally the app was supposed to be my little entrance into iPhone development. I needed something simple to get acquainted with design, development, and distribution of iPhone apps. It was basically my “Hello, World” app. Of course, as the story goes, Apple rejected my app after taking way too long to review. By this point I’m already getting ready to head back to school where my time was only going to get harder to put into an app.

I’m not really mad at Apple, nor do I want to really make this a big deal. Its their App Store and they can make any rules they want. We knew the iPhone was a pretty closed system when we bought them and developers knew the App Store was going to be a pretty controlled place. We can’t say we didn’t see this coming; it’s Apple.

So where does that leave me? I don’t have much motivation to update MailWrangler to the latest SDK version (right now it compiles but won’t run… something changed) so I can’t even resubmit it. The app was just a little thing I threw together in a weekend, nothing big or special. Although I think it would be useful to have, even I don’t need it more than once every so often — the built-in mail app works well enough for my needs. Also, because of my issues with the App Store, it’s hard to put in effort on something that could just be rejected again. There’s plenty of stories out there and more all the time of people continuing to be rejected or ignored by Apple’s review process. It just isn’t worth my time to keep dealing with it.

Short story? I probably won’t be getting around to doing anything with MailWrangler again for a while. While I bet there’s a good chance I could get it approved eventually, it just isn’t worth my time right now (I’d rather spend it finishing out school so I can graduate in May, and enjoying those last months of college). And although I could release it via Cydia or other similar system — there’s a significantly smaller audience and I would still need to update the app to even work. Then there’s support and maintenance. Again, for me right now it isn’t worth it.

I think I’ll stick to web applications.

So in July I wrote a small iPhone app called MailWrangler. Basically this app enabled a user to add their GMail accounts (standard and Google Apps For Your Domain) which they could load and switch between them quickly. It embedded Webkit in to the app and logged you in to the accounts automagically. Normally to check multiple Gmail accounts in mobile Safari you would have to log in and out of all of the accounts, typing the username and password for each. Using just the Apple Mail application you aren’t able to see threaded views, your google contacts, archive (quickly), star, etc without going through the hassles that are present when using Gmail’s IMAP on the iPhone. There’s a similar app for the Mac desktop called MailPlane.

I submitted my application on July 17th. On August 29th I finally heard back from Apple:

… Your application duplicates the functionality of the built-in iPhone application Mail without providing sufficient differentiation or added functionality, which will lead to user confusion. …

This is an interesting claim since although handing email, my app is simply directly loading and showing Gmail inside of an application. How you can confuse Gmail with Mail.app I’m not sure.

There was another issue:

… There is also no way to edit an account once it has been added. …

I agree that this should work. Currently you have to delete and re-add the account. You don’t lose anything since all the account info stores is a username and password. I felt for a first release this would be fine (how often do you change your gmail password?). The number of apps with this specific issue and other issues that apps have which are in the store, mine seems to be on par or ahead of the game. If you’re going to have rules about this, enforce them across the board. The number of shitty apps in the store is off the charts and yet mine that actually works is getting blocked.

What did I pay to be able to do again? Oh right, deal with Apple’s messy bureaucracy. I guess I should just write another flashlight or glowstick application to actually get published. That’s the only apps Apple seems to want in the store.