App was rejected from App Store because of UIWebview

Question

This is the message I got from them:

We found that the experience your app provides is not sufficiently different from a web browsing experience, as it would be by incorporating native iOS functionality.

While your app content may differ from your web site or other existing sites, the experience it provides does not differ significantly from the general experience of using Safari, as required by the App Store Review Guidelines.

You may wish to provide convenient access to a web property for a select or niche group of users - and may enhance that experience with features such as Push Notifications. However, such apps do not include enough native iOS functionality to be appropriate for the App Store. As an alternative, you may wish to provide instructions to your users on how to create a Safari web clip to add to their iOS device Home Screen. Or, if you would like to share the app with a select group of users, we recommend the Ad Hoc distribution method. See the iOS Provisioning Portal for details on Ad Hoc Distribution.

We encourage you to review your app concept and evaluate whether you can incorporate additional features to enhance the user experience.

Has anyone gotten something similar? What types of native iOS functionality would work and how do you implement them? I'm new to the app store so I don't know if just by adding what they say about providing instructions on how users can create safari web clipping will get my app approved. Also, if the instructions can just be written in a pop up message?
Any advice will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Update I see what you guys are saying, let me better describe what I'm doing and maybe that way you can help me.

My app is a radio app where I can listen to my favorite radio station and read the news at the same time with out leaving the app (news from a web view).

Answer 1

From that message (and since you didn't give a description of the app at all), it seems like you just made an app that encapsulated an UIWebView to load an specific page, since you can do that via Safari, they reject apps like that.

You can:

• Make the app fetch the data from the web server, BUT, display it with native controls (with UITableViews, UIButtons, UIImages, etc). This would require quite a bit amount of work.

• Drop the app and tell the users, on your site, that they can add that website as a web clip on their phones.