Unity-Powered iPhone Games Rejected from iTunes App Store

A number of iPhone developers report that their Unity-powered applications have failed Apple's approval process, and are denied release in the iTunes App Store. A thread at the Unity Community forums reveals that these applications have the potential of using non-public APIs accessible via the Unity game authoring tool. The same APIs were allegedly used by iPhone social RPG developer Storm8 to obtain, store, and transmit player phone numbers without prior permission. Though Storm8 claims that its applications have been updated to remove this functionality, many of the company's games, including iMobsters, World War, and Zombies Live, have since been removed from the App Store and are no longer available for download. Ravensword: The Fallen King, an open-world RPG to be published by Chillingo, was among the handful of Unity engine games to be denied an App Store release. Many Unity developers received their rejection notices from Apple earlier this week, despite explaining that the included APIs were not used to harvest phone numbers. Several affected apps included no network functionality at all. Unity notes in another forum thread that the issue has been addressed, and the next engine update will remove the flagged APIs. Authors of rejected apps will need to resubmit their games to Apple's approval process following the release of the updated engine. [UPDATE: Unity has also published a weblog post on its official website explaining the problem and the fix.]