It’s been relatively quiet of late in the world of App Store rejections, but an interesting one popped up over the weekend from the developer of Read It Later, the popular iPhone app which allows you to save text for reading at a later date.

The Read It Later company blog was updated over the weekend to report that the latest version, 2.2, has been rejected by Apple. The rejection comes as a surprise given that it’s what the company calls a “fairly minor update,” with the only “new” functionality coming by way of using the open source sharing library ShareKit.

Strangely, Apple has singled out a feature of Read It Later which is also shared by hundreds (probably thousands) of others -- allowing users to register for a service when the app is first launched. According to the notice received by the RIL developers, “Applications cannot require user registration prior to allowing access to app features and content; such user registration must be optional and tied to account-based functionality.”

Needless to say, the rejection on those grounds has come as a shock to the developers of Read It Later, who feel that it could have “major implications” -- especially since the feature has been there from the beginning.

“If that is true, then outside of games, almost every single popular application in the app store would be affected,” the company blog explains. “The Facebook app, Twitter app, Evernote app, Google Reader apps, and any other application for a web-based service that requires an account would be rejected.”

The developer is naturally hoping that the change of heart is a “simple misunderstanding” and not a policy change on Apple’s part. “I cannot imagine most companion apps to web services would be very useful without an account,” the blog post concludes. “For example, would you want to use an account-less Facebook app?”

Here’s hoping that Apple steps up and clarifies this potentially damaging new policy which end users have been enjoying for a long time.

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