Question

I got my app rejected because it crashed on iPad.
And to be honest it should crash, because it doesn’t have sim card which my app uses (for sending messages). I have made devices: iphone, and deployment target iphone in my build. Yet for some reason guys at apple still tried to run it on iPad. How could I make my app only for iPhone? There is no reason to catch exceptions and try to run it on iPad or iPod touch, as most of the app functionality containts sendings sms..
What should I do ? And how to make sure that app gets only on iPhone, not on iPad or iPod touch

Answer 1

I think one option is to provide UIRequiredDeviceCapabilities flag in application info.plist.
You can give Telephony or sms, so it should filter out devices without sim card.

From iphone app programming guide.

UIRequiredDeviceCapabilities — The App Store uses this key to determine the capabilities of your app and to prevent it from being
installed on devices that do not support features your app requires

It should be better if you read App Releted Resources section in the above pdf (page 93).

From the above document,

If your app requires the presence or absence of specific device
capabilities in order to run, you must declare those requirements
using the UIRequiredDeviceCapabilities key in your app’s Info.plist
file. At runtime, iOS cannot launch your app unless the declared
capabilities are present on the device. Further, the App Store
requires this information so that it can generate a list of
requirements for user devices and prevent users from downloading apps
that they cannot run

It says, iOS checks for required device capabilities before launching. So I think you don’t have any problem. Regarding simulator, I am not sure whether above applies to them, since we can even simulate incoming calls in simulator (with you know simulator doesn’t have sim card). So I am not sure how much simulator helps you in this case.

One more thing, Apple will only reject the app if it crashes when run on non-sim devices. Apple always approve an app that gracefully check whether device capabilities present before using it. You can check whether the device can send sms, before using sms feature..

if([MFMessageComposeViewController canSendText]){
  // send sms
}

If it can’t sent sms, show an alert box indicating the same. Just 2 lines of codes, but less head ache and tension..