Apple has always been very strict when it comes to making use of all the buttons and elements that are part of the devices, whether they are iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. On more than one occasion, if you regularly use the iPad to edit photos, surely you have missed that the iPad had some extra button to access quickly to one of the options offered by the application without having to use the screen.
The creators of Luna Display and Astropad came up with a new method to make use of the front camera of the iPad as if it were a button that calls for action by placing your finger on top of the camera. Unfortunately, this keyboard shortcut has not sat very well with the guys from Cupertino and has rejected the application.
The Luna Display application, an application that allows us to turn our iPad into an extension of our Mac screen, offered us a simple and quick idea to open the application options menu just by touching the front camera, as we can see in the image above, without having to show any type of button on the screen that may affect the operation of the application. This function was also planned to be implemented in the Astropad application, but due to Apple's refusal, Astro HQ, developer of both applications, has announced that it will not implement it.
Apple has shielded itself in section 2.5.9 of the Apple Store guidelines in which it states that applications that alter or disable functions of the device, such as the volume controls or button to mute the device, or any other system of the same that affects user interaction will be rejected.
Astro HQ is not the first application to have been rejected by Apple for making use of the device's buttons for other functions. The application Camera + was rejected in 2011 for making use of the volume buttons to take photos. Ironically, Apple integrated this feature into later versions of iOS, confirming that it was an excellent idea.
