All Articles Tagged objectionable content

Ninjawords [$1.99 - iTunes link], a delightfully crafted dictionary application, was rejected from the iTunes App Store no less than three times of “objectionable content” and still slapped with a 17+ rating before being approved in mutilated form in just the latest of Apple’s stupefying, infuriating, frustrating, and ultimately disappointing blunders that haunt their mobile platform.

Daring Fireball casts a scathing light on the Ninjawords situation, and sums it up brilliantly:

The list of omitted words includes some which have utterly non-objectionable senses: ass, snatch, pussy, cock, and even screw. (Ass and cock appear throughout the King James Bible.)

Every time I think I’ve seen the most outrageous App Store rejection, I’m soon proven wrong. I can’t imagine what it will take to top this one.

Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to purchase a censored dictionary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day.

Yes, you cannot find words for donkeys, cats, roosters, or hardware in this one dictionary on the App Store (though you can, of course, in Apple’s own Mac OS X dictionary). Gruber also rightly points out that App Store reviewers would have had to deliberately search for words like f–k and c–t to find them, given the care taken by the apps developers in filtering results, which mirrors the rejection of e-book reader Eucalyptus when not one but two App Store reviewers deliberately searched for Kama Sutra, apparently just so they could reject an app. (Maybe because they duplicate functionality of Mobile Safari?)

Steve Jobs is back. Could we desperately suggest nothing, not Eric Schmidt, not iTablets, not AT&T should be higher on his priority list than forcing sanity upon the App Store and now? Or does Apple really want the influential, tech-savvy apperati to start considering competing platforms?

While we don’t want to turn this into the rejected-app-of-the-day column, as an end-cap to the week, and perhaps a chance to test out the theory we proposed earlier in the BargainBin post, we thought we’d pass along one last example of Apple App Store weirdness, via Mippin:

Quite early on in the process they failed us because of rude words in some of the Internet articles we were publishing. Early this week Tweetie was rejected for the same reason- they kicked up such a stink on Twitter that Apple backed down within hours and accepted it. When this happened to us though, 3 weeks ago, we bowed to their greater wisdom and implemented 2 levels of checking for our iPhone application to prevent “objectionable” content getting through. We rate all our 50,000 feeds in Mippin and prevent most if it even getting to the user, then just to be sure we check every word in the article real-time for a list of rude words and if one appears we block the display of the content from the server. We thought this was enough, but this week we got rejected because of a YouTube video – we were amazed at this. In the very amusing video “sxephil” does use one rude word, but in our minds YouTube have allowed this through – its certainly acceptable to them. What’s even worse we found the same video through Apple’s own YouTube application on the iPhone

Friday the 13th? “Duplicates functionality” coverall? Vestiges of the same Tweetie “Church Lady” reviewer? And will it get to the point where developers can cry “pocket rejection” or “incompetence” when even valid issues are raised by Apple? What do you think?

Comparative screenshots after the break…

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