Great idea! And a little bomb animation when the app expires.

Here’s an official response posted on the Apple forum that a developer received: “Hello Mocha Developer, Unfortunately, Mocha xxxx will not be posted to the App Store. We are not accepting Trial, Demo, or Beta versions of any applications. If you would like to provide a free or ‘Lite’ version, it still must be a fully functional app.” It appears free versions are allowed if they follow my example, not the traditional crippled or expiration dated model.

Read on a forum that when developers try to submit time limited, or crippled versions as free applications, they are being rejected. So you can do a free demo as long as it’s fully functional forever. Not what developers were hoping for, that’s for sure!

I don’t know about free trials, but I did see one app which had a free lite version, and a pay full version.

I was a little disappointed that eWallet wasn’t in the store.

I would think it’d be up to the developer to build and offer a free trial version of an app. It’s not like a video or song where Apple can just cut a snippet for a preview. There’s programming involved in creating a trial version of an app. So if a developer wants to offer a free trial version, he can release, say, a free version of Monkey Ball with only one level or ends after 30 seconds. Should work just fine with the current App Store model.