Sales
posted this on Feb 18 18:22
Here are a few ways to get additional feeds into your app if you don't have enough of your own content. These feeds also provide the additional benefit of broadening the appeal of your app to a larger audience (which Apple really likes to see).
Some of the feeds below are easier to search for inside AppMakr, and some are easier to search for outside of AppMakr.
Twitter Account: You can look up the Twitter account of a user, for example here is the LOLcats Twitter account, and add that into AppMakr. You can do this by typing your search term and the word Twitter in the search box on AppMakr's Feeds tab, like this:

Flickr: Same thing goes for Flickr, just type your search term and the word Flickr to see what results come up. NOTE: There is a currently bug in the Flickr feed. You wil need to remove a string of characters at the end of the feed for it to work (highlighted in blue in the image below):

There are some feed types that are easier to grab outside of the AppMakr search box, as follows:
Google News: You can do a search for any topic in Google News and add that to your app. For example, here's a search result for the term "LOLcats". At the very, very bottom of the website you'll see a little link called "RSS".

That's what you'll want to put into AppMakr in the "feeds" tab. Here's what the RSS feed from that same page looks like. Note: Google News feeds do not currently validate, but we have tested them and found them to work in AppMakr apps. However, when you use any feed that doesn't validate, you're using it at your own risk, as there is something wrong with the feed. A way to mitigate this risk is to load an Apple Developer Account into AppMakr so you can test the app on your own phone before submitting it to Apple. Here's more on that topic
Twitter Search: Similar to the Twitter account above, but this is searching for anyone on Twitter talking about certain terms, vs. showing content from one specific Twitter account. For example, here's the search result for LOLcats on Twitter. You can see there's an RSS icon that says "Feed for this query" - that's what you'll want to put into AppMakr. Here's the actual RSS feed for that same search.
There are surely more places you can pull content from. We'd encourage you to register for an account on this forum and then post your own tips here as well!

In my app, I'm pulling in content and the photo feed doesnt validate, yet it looks fine in the simulator. Will that be a problem?

Try using http://alltop.com/, our users have had good luck with their content. But, yes that is true, apple is constantly using more rigorous criteria.

I followed this advice and added some other education-related RSS feeds to my teaching app. However, I've just it rejected. The response from Apple included a warning that my app used 3rd party feeds (e.g. BBC) and requested that I send 'documentary evidence' to show that I have the rights to use their content.
Maybe they're getting more cautious about people using 3rd party content in their apps?