iPhone Application Graveyard

The app was available briefly for jailbreak users, but that seems to have ended since Apple restored it to the App Store.

For those who don't know what Slasher was: It showed a picture of a knife, and if you shook the device, it played a scream.

It came out during a wave of stabbings in the UK, so Apple may have been getting many complaints from people there. I think it's a heavy-handed response, though, to kill the app everywhere because of unfortunate timing in one country.

TechRadar UK interviewed PJ Holden, one of Murderdrome's developers. In the interview, Holden says that they would love to participate in a ratings sytem. I thought that the App Store already had one, but Holden says that the App Store only has it for games—it does not have one for books, nor for comic books.

The developers created a second comic book using the same engine. This one, named EyeCandy, is for children. Apple approved it, so it's available in the App Store now.

This is a special case, in that Apple isn't the villain here. Apparently, The Tetris Company contacted Apple and threatened some sort of legal action, and Apple contacted Witherspoon with the news, and Witherspoon responded by removing his own app.

This app never made it on to the App Store at all. Apple rejected the initial submission; unlike most of these, this isn't an app that they approved and later withdrew. I include it because it was one of the early news stories about Apple rejecting apps for taste.

This was the first app whose reason for making headlines was Apple killing it for competing with one of Apple's own applications—in this case, the PC (Mac OS X and Windows) versions of iTunes. (Apple killed MailWrangler first, but it didn't make news until later because MailWrangler's developer waited before announcing it on his blog.)

For a while, Almerica continued to sell licenses using Ad-Hoc Distribution, but Apple withdrew his ability to do that. (Not surprising—Ad-Hoc Distribution, as I understand it, is intended for such things as beta testing, not full-scale distribution. Remember, the App Store is supposed to be the only way to mass-distribute an iPhone app.)

The application shows a pair of clocks, both analog and digital, counting down to the end of George W. Bush's Presidency. Below the digital clock, a caption reads “…till the end of an error!”. The analog clock features a caricature of Bush, whose arms are the hands of the clock.

After Apple rejected his app, the developer appealed to Steve Jobs by email. Jobs responded: “… I think this app will be offensive to roughly half our customers. What’s the point?”

Tim Robertson interviewed one of the developers of Shaker for his MyMac.com podcast. He sent me the link to the episode, number 204; the interview starts at 24 minutes 35 seconds and runs for about 16½ minutes, and is followed by discussion among the panel without the developer present.

The most interesting thing about the Shaker case is that The Tetris Company apparently asserted copyright infringement, not trademark infringement (in the case of Tris, they'd asserted trademark infringement). On the one hand, this makes some sense, as the name “Shaker” bears no similarity at all to the trademark “Tetris”—asserting trademark infringement would be insane. On the other hand, considering the dramatically different themes, is The Tetris Company accusing Phunkware of burgling their code? I'm curious what part of Tetris the Tetris Company thinks Phunkware infringed the copyright on.

I strongly recommend that you listen to the full interview, as there are many other details that I'm leaving out for brevity.

Note that 1.3 is the first version Apple's rejected. Apple approved all three previous versions; in fact, 1.2 was still available even after Apple had rejected 1.3.

My guess is that either Apple will go “oh yeah, it's a radio app; of course it uses lots of bandwidth” and approve it, or they'll reveal to the developers that the app is using too much data even for a radio app because of a bug in 1.3, and that Apple will eventually approve 1.3 or a fixed version of it. Yup. I don't know which happened, but they've now approved 1.3.