The idea was to collect real data about user preferences that could be used to inform other VR researchers. There was a minor bug which we have just fixed, but Oculus Share just rejected the app without any explanation ("We ... have determined we will not be publishing your app on the Oculus Store.")
Is there any other way of distributing the app? We admit the application isn't probably a mainstream app (though the experience is far from boring, with a nice motion captured singing animation), but colleagues of our at other universities would like to run the study as they are interested in the results, and we have a limited capacity ourselves to run people through the study.
Maybe you can distribute your apk through http://www.sideloadvr.com/ It's a GearVR apk distribution platform, meant for developers and beta testers.
SideloadVR builds custom GearVR .apks that include the user's signature file. This means that developers can share their ideas without going through Oculus Home and the global signing process.
I do share your concerns though -- I assume they didn't put it up there because the average user would have no interest in it, but that is obviously not a satisfying reason for you or whoever is interested in what you've created. A more general concern about Oculus Home and the Store is that it's extremely limited. Download a terrible experience once and you can never remove that icon even after you've uninstalled it, no matter how much you may wish to never see it again. And it's not scalable at all -- currently there are few enough experiences that you can break them into about 3-4 categories ("Games", "Experiences", "Apps", etc) and then just literally page through all of them looking for what you want, but if there are even just 200 experiences, this is not a manageable UI without the usual app store fixtures like nested categories, a search tool, etc. And after you've downloaded all these apps, even if you do want to keep them all, there's no way to organize them, so your Library becomes a massive dumping ground that is a bit painful to sort through.
I can only assume that they are working on something else to replace the whole system we currently have. I hope so, anyway.
Yes, you would think by now companies would be smart enough to provide some means of organization of apps by users. Yet the Samsung store is certainly not setup to handle more than the amount it has. Same organizations problems are happening with most of the VR video sites with very poor or final organization possible.
And by now there have been more than a few app stores so Oculus approval should be a fairly clear process with updates to developers instead 1 form letter response.
Well we got no reasons at all for rejection, even after requesting some feedback. I can only assume that it isn't the type of application that they want to support, as if there was a technical problem with the content we could easily fix that. Maybe they just don't want any "serious" applications on the platform, or anything that has a niche application - developers should be aware of this (e.g. I know a company that wants to do some user testing research on a consumer VR platform for a health application, but it is now too risky to suggest that they use Gear VR).
I knew about Sideload VR and hadn't thought it applicable, but I can see one or two collaborators taking the trouble to use it so will do that.
