I think there must be more to this than is in the article. I think some of the Apple sample apps use and I've bought apps that use it. There's no reason for Apple to not want developers to use common gestures. They even made it easier with one of the recent SDKs by adding gesture recognizers so you can reuse gestures more easily.
The headline is a little bit misleading. The app was rejected for using the peek interface not the pinch to expand. Tons of apps use the pinch to expand gesture it's just what the gesture does visually that Apple has a problem with. This is a subtle distinction and I still think Apple are in the wrong but the headline of the original article is unclear.
The iPhone OS 3.2 SDK (which is used to build iPad apps) provides explicit developer support for detecting the pinch gesture, in the form of UIPinchGestureRecognizer:<p><a href="http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/UIKit/Reference/UIPinchGestureRecognizer_Class/Reference/Reference.html" rel="nofollow">http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/UIKi...</a><p><a href="http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/General/Conceptual/iPadProgrammingGuide/GestureSupport/GestureSupport.html" rel="nofollow">http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/Gene...</a><p>We don't know the whole story here, but those saying that this rejection happened because Apple only wants its own apps to use the pinch gesture clearly have no clue what they're talking about.
What's happening here is probably similar to Apple's position on coverflow imitations - there have been lots of rejections for apps that imitate coverflow poorly, even without private APIs.<p>Speaking with somebody directly about this, and basically, their stance is: coverflow is an experience owned by Apple. If you imitate it poorly or inaccurately, users will have a bad / confusing experience (Apple's call what 'poorly or inaccurately' means, of course).
I wonder if this is because of claimed patents around pinching? AIUI, patents are allowed to be selectively enforced, but I would actually prefer that they choose to be consistent about it.<p>If software patents are evil, then at least predictable evil is easier to deal with than unknown lurking evil...
That's ridiculous.<p>Apple should rightly be roasted for this kind of bullying. There's nothing about pinch-to-expand that would threaten Apple's control over the user experience in any way.
So we have an Apple response arriving back to a submitter that's listing a different app?<p>With few (no) details on why.<p>It is not clear if this Apple response is even relevant to this submitter's application.<p>These folks could have gotten punted for some other expected reason.<p>Or this could be advertising their stuff by submitting something they knew would get rejected, and then resubmitting without it.<p>We do not know what's really going on here. On most any aspect of this.