Jumping on a trend within a few hours! Story of "Fold to Unlock"lock"

[Syndicated Puzzles]

At one point everyone on twitter was talking about Anton Kudins (Russian graphic artist) design called "Fold to Unlock" . The discussions in the Cydia community was very positive and people where begging developers to build the app for jailbroken devices. Sure enough in record speed the concept was ready to download by several providers.

Again the feedback was amazing and the IOS users were mumbling how Fold to Unlock needs to be incorporated by Apple to update the Slide to Unlock feature.
( WE all know that third party apps can only pretend or falsely promote to lock IOS devices!) This is the dilemma!

In the background while all this activity is taking place our company iLifeTouch was feverishly building a version for IOS hoping Apple would approve the app. We hit our first snag trying to build the folding animation. Went back to Twitter contacted one of the guys who tweeted that he helped build the jail broken version, made a paypal transaction and bought the missing portion of code to complete the animations functionality.

Two of our developers and a graphic designer worked all weekend and we were ready to submit our version that in our opinion was awesome. So went from hearing about the concept to submitting in around 5 days. Which is pretty much the best result you could expect.

Waited 7 days Fold to Unlock went into review and was immediately rejected. The surprise wasn't the rejection but more the reason why. Apple was claiming ownership to the concept and notified us we were infringing on their folding design.

Ok now what? We didn't even anticipate something like this? So after a quick huddle we regrouped and decided to change the design. It was quite obvious nothing but a radical design makeover would pass Apple's request. So we exchanged direction of the folding screen from the top down instead of being left to right and we got rid of the slider and text and added a plain rope that you pull down to make the screen collapse.

Resubmitted. And waited and waited and waited. Finally I wrote a reminder and Apple responded by approving our new layout.

Fold to Unlock finally went live. 5 days to build 21 days to get approved. Building an update right now.

[Syndicated Puzzles]

Apple actually sent us an ancient locking image of an iPod that uses the folding functionality. The whole ownership component of the rejection was very brief and nothing to sink your teeth into. From our past experience with this issue a complete redesign is your only hope.


We are a small company with 12 team members. ( 4 coders) We just pushed to get it out first. We put the Fold to Unlock app on top of our 9 Dots app and improved what we needed to. That made up for lots of time.

We didn't want to pretend to be locking the IOS devices with a fake entertainment style app adding everything that goes with pulling that stunt off. Our team just couldn't live with themselves trying to pull that gimmick off. So we opted for a protected folders option that drastically hurt our sales in a split second.

[Syndicated Puzzles]

We generally only build utility style apps for OSX. We currently have the most apps (heading towards 70 apps) on the Mac App Store we still have no idea how we ended up in this position. We build everything from scratch or build on existing code from other apps we have already built. IOS is not our focus nor games.