One Box to Rule Them All ;]

Few months ago i was working at JSC Vertex and we made parking app for our biggest mobile service provider and official iPhone seller Omnitel.
You know those thingies that stands near street and you can pay by SMS or real money to leave your car? Well app had to eliminated all payment problems.
Omnitel told that it would be way too much trouble to get money from Apple (and in way they a right, and of course they dint wanted to give Apple 30%) and asked to come up with better solution than In App Purchase.
So because Omnitel is a mobile service provider and iPhone is a phone i thought that Omnitel could bill users directly. User have to make indication that he agree to be billed, but you can't send SMS using iPhone SDK API so solution was to call some service on Omnitel side through GPRS/EDGE/3G so they can detect users phone number and it would be like indication that user agrees to be billed. So, Omnitel bills user and bill comes with monthly mobile bill. Everything works like magic from users side :)

We made app and submitted to App Store.

And here our troubles began...

Because it was localized solution at first Apple rejected app because they could not check it properly. So we explained in details how it works and mailed (with real mail) them sticker for car and Omnitel SIM card. So all that took about 2 month i guess. Then app was rejected again because we not comply with agreement. Ah, nice explanation... Because we already had contacts with Apple we called them to ask what was that about and after long discussion it was said that app have to use In App Purchase either it has to be free. So no 3rd party billing...

Doh, i made app in few days and at this point we already wasted half a year on this project...

I won't discuss resolution and how app got to app store, but it wasn't what i'm proud of :). If you really interested write to me @ rolandas@ud7.lt