All Articles Tagged rejection

Last week the first iPhone (and iPod touch) app to feature nudity was live in the iTunes App Store. Technically, however, it was simply a change in the server behind the app — the developer added nude images.

Subsequently, however, the app became unavailable. The developer first reported that their own servers couldn’t keep up with demand for the newly nudified images, but it turns out Apple laid the hammer down on the “soft-core porn” app:

Apple will not distribute applications that contain inappropriate content, such as pornography. The developer of this application added inappropriate content directly from their server after the application had been approved and distributed, and after the developer had subsequently been asked to remove some offensive content. This was a direct violation of the terms of the iPhone Developer Program. The application is no longer available on the App Store.

Given that Apple has included new parental controls and App Store restrictions in iPhone 3.0, including a declaration for nude content, and given the eternal argument that nudity is available for age-appropriate viewers via iTunes movies, is there some contradiction still at work? Or is Apple drawing the line artificially close for now while it watches and gauges reaction?

[via CNN]

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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Was it the outcry on Twitter? The evisceration courtesy of numerous blogs? Or did someone at Apple actually take our advice and wake up? We don’t know. But we do know this: according to developer Loren Brichter:

Great news! [Tweetie] 1.3 has now been approved! Alright Apple!

Hopefully this wasn’t as capricious a reversal as it was an earlier refusal, and Apple is actually investing some thought in how to get the App Store approval process back on track.

Hey, we can dream, right?

Following up on the story about Tweetie 1.3 being rejected because an Apple reviewer saw the word f**k in the Twitter Trends tab, developer Crowded Road contacted us with the story of their app, Human Weather, which was initially rejected by Apple for a similar reason: someone happened to have dropped the f-bomb in the Twitter-stream while it was being reviewed.

Crowded Road went to the trouble — and no doubt cost in man/hours — to implement a filter for said reject-worthy words, and is now available FREE in the App Store [iTunes link]. But so what? As the developers themselves rightly told us:

This kind of policy is doomed to fail simply because it is impossible to police. Apple is only check the app content through a random test as part of their approval process. Of course, looking for “offensive” content as part of an approval process is futile because user generated content is both limitless and unpredictable.

No doubt this is correct, as creative internet users already know. F**k getting filtered? Fug, fukc, fack, fock, f u c k, and limitless other combinations impenetrable to machines but easily parsed by human pattern-matching brains, will easily slip through to offend those easily offended and amuse those easily amused alike.

We’d typically finish up with a rant about how the App Store could be improved, made more transparent with clearly defined criteria, even establish a ratings system for apps as they have for iTunes media, but really, even they must know this by now, right?

Wow, alliteration much? Not sure if it was just a delay (as Apple seems mostly impervious to pressure from the web or customers, open letters included), or some bizarre equal and opposite reaction to Tweetie 1.3 being rejected, but AppleiPhoneApps.com is now reporting that Jonathan Zdziarski’s AMBER Alert app has (finally?) been approved and published to the iTunes App Store:

AMBER Alert [iTunes link] is now available at the [US] App Store for free, and gives users real-time information regarding missing children. Zdziarkski worked closely with the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children to make this the official AMBER Alert tool for the iPhone.

Another app, BargainBin, is still languishing in limbo, however, prompting an interesting question on the same site about whether or not the App Store uses “pocket rejections” at times.

Clearly the App Store process remains anything but clear…

While many sites are reporting that the iPhone App Store has hit 10,000, MacRumors says it’s not quite there yet, but will be soon:

While several sites have reported that 10,000 iPhone Apps have been released into the App Store, the actual number of active iPhone apps that can be downloaded is about 9,676 as of today’s count. The discrepancy comes from the fact that many apps have been removed from the App Store for various reasons (trademark infringement, discontinued apps, pulled and released).

With approximately a quarter of those being games, and a tenth each for entertainment and utilities.

Want to get your App up as part of the next 10,000? Erica Sadun has some tips for you. What are they in brief?

Keep your icon consistent throughout the various sizes, don’t link to web sites you haven’t deployed yet, don’t ever include any mention of “beta”, and do not reference forbidden accessories (like a mic for the iPod Touch).

Check out the full article on App Store Lessons for much more by way of explanation and example.