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 wasn't an app that they approved and later withdrew. I included it because it was one of the early news stories about Apple rejecting apps for taste.

Happily, Apple changed their minds and approved it, three months later.

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.)

iPhone OS 2.2 introduced the ability to download podcasts inside the iTunes and Video apps on the device. Only Apple knows whether they were referring to this then-forthcoming feature, or decided to add it after seeing the reaction to their rejecting Podcaster.

On 2009-01-23, Apple approved “Podcasters younger sibling” [sic], an app called Rss Player. The developer says “It is basically Podcaster without the Search Directory”, but that “It has several features that Podcaster does not”. It's unclear whether Apple approved Rss Player because he removed the Search Directory or because Apple had changed their policy on “duplicating functionality”.

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.

According to the developer in his blog post announcing the rejection, some companies offer non-geographic phone numbers as a way to reduce costs to callers (and, according to the Wikipedia article, provide a number that isn't tied to the location of the phone it's connected to), but some mobile-phone service providers actually charge more for such calls.

The app queries a website called SayNoTo0870.com, which provides alternative (geographic) numbers for the non-geographic numbers, so that callers using such mobile carriers can avoid the extra charges.

I don't normally list apps that Apple rejects for using private APIs, because (as Apple points out in the rejection letter that Fuller quotes) the SDK agreement expressly prohibits it, and it's a perfectly reasonable (and objective) thing to prohibit. As Fuller puts it, code that uses private APIs is “time-bomb code” (because Apple could change or remove the private API at any time).

The reason I'm listing Peeps is that, according to Fuller, Peeps doesn't use private APIs. Plausible Labs created their own clean-room implementation of CoverFlow; Fuller links to a QuickTime movie of it in a demo mode (showing the construction of one cover).

If Peeps really does use Plausible Labs' own implementation of CoverFlow (and I have no reason to doubt that at this point), it suggests that whoever reviewed Peeps simply assumed that it uses Apple's implementation (which is behind a private API), instead of actually checking whether it does or not.

In an ironic twist, another post of Fuller's notes that another application, Safari Bookbag, does use the same private API that Apple accused Plausible Labs of using. Whoever reviewed Bookbag did not catch this, and it's still available as of 2008-12-21. (Update 2008-12-24: Safari Bookbag 1.3 is now available, and now uses Fuller's implementation.)

Nine days after Fuller's blog post (and an unknown amount of time after his support request with Apple), Apple approved Peeps.

The content in question is one character's retelling of another character's sexual encounter, including a quote from the involved character who used the third word on George Carlin's original list twice.

So far, I haven't even seen any indication that the novel directly visits the sex scene in question—otherwise, wouldn't Apple have rejected the novel for that? Instead, the novel presents one character's recounting of the sex scene, including the quote containing the two F-bombs. I've also seen no indication that there are any other, more explicit sex scenes elsewhere in the story.

That makes the rejection puzzling, because iTunes carries plenty of content far more explicit than this. Carnoy points out several examples in NewsFactor's article: Rap in the Music Store, R-rated movies in the Movie Store, and audiobooks at least as explicit as his own novel. And if you were to make a movie that contained this scene, the MPAA would rate it R, solely for the two F-words (the limit for PG-13 is 1).

What iTunes really needs is a rating system.

The version that Apple approved on 2009-01-14 has this statement in its description:

All explicit words or scenes have been carefully removed from this second version of the ebook, to suit readers of all ages. The print version remains unchanged. KNIFE MUSIC is available at amazon.com. Please visit the KNIFE MUSIC website at www.knifemusicbook.com

I don't know what scenes the developers removed, and I have no idea how well the story holds up without them.

Prohibition 2 is an iPhone remake of a classic game called Drug Wars, which casts the player as a drug dealer who has 30 days to make it in New York's illegal-drug market.

Again, the developer points to three things in the iTunes store—a song and two movies—that contain drug references. The two differences are that these things are rated as for mature audiences (“explicit” in the case of the rap song; R in the case of both movies), and they are not interactive.

Would Apple approve a first-person shooter where the enemies were humans (not monsters)? Killing humans is illegal (outside of a military), and almost everybody agrees that it's wrong and objectionable, and that depictions of it are mature content. Would they approve an FPS if it were by an independent developer, or only if it came from a major game studio? (We've seen with Google Mobile and the version of Safari Bookbag that broke on OS 2.2 that Apple is willing to hold double standards, at least with private APIs. [Update 2009-01-15: On the other hand, it turns out that they did reject a 2.2-compatibility update to Bookbag that continued to use the private API. So maybe they've become more vigilant about new submissions, if not already-approved apps.])

The developer seems to have satisfied Apple by changing the material that the player trades from drugs to candy. Six days after Apple rejected Dope Wars, they approved Candy Wars.

Contrary to its name, this game actually lets you play as any of 18 different politicians. Your player-character—the politician—jumps on a trampoline, and you direct him or her to break balloons with his or her head.

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that the reason is the Bill Clinton avatar, whom the game depicts as not wearing pants. (You can see that in the developers' gameplay video and in their screenshot of another product on their website.) Apple might have considered this “offensive or defamatory”, like it did the first version of Tim Burks' Obama! game. But that's just a guess.

The game is a sort of alternate-reality choose-your-own-adventure game built mainly of live-action cut-scenes (replacing the page or two of text that Bantam's Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books used). At the points where you would turn to one page or the other in a paper book, the game presents you with a dialog box; after you make your choice, you click a button labeled “FIRE TEMPORAL MUONS”. Cuppett posted a video demo on his Vintage ToonCast YouTube account.

I disagree with Apple's statement in a literal interpretation; he uses a dialog box as a dialog box and a button as a button. No confusion there. The “FIRE TEMPORAL MUONS” button seems like it could get annoying (I just tapped one button! Why do you want me to tap another one?), but is not confusing.

The app is a simple phone-dialer application, along with a “Handbook” offering some tips on performing successful booty calls. They've resubmitted with that feature removed, in the hope that it was the “inappropriate sexual content” Apple is referring to.

The biggest problem with Apple's rejections right now is that they are terribly non-specific about what they are rejecting the app for. They point out the rule, but not what part of the app violated it. They seem to be assuming that the developers already know what they did wrong.

In early May of 2009, Bearded Pony's Chief Creative Officer emailed me and informed me that the app is now available under the name “Black Book Caller”. At first, they resubmitted it without the handbook; later, they “dialed back the language in the handbook (quite a bit)” and submitted an update with the revised handbook, and Apple approved it.

Tweetie is a Twitter client. Apple rejected version 1.3 because the trends list currently includes the hashtag “#FuckItList”.

But the trends list is not generated by Tweetie. Tweetie displays it, but the information comes from Twitter Search—it's part of the web. As various people have suggested, if they think developers should protect iPhone users from certain naughty words, Apple should add a swear-filter to Safari. Until they do, this is just hypocrisy.

Also, the tweets themselves can contain swearing (that's what creates those trends: people use those words, phrases, and tags in their tweets). Is Apple claiming that Tweetie should censor your friends' tweets?

Brichter later resubmitted the same 1.3 binary, and Apple approved it.

Pocket God is an episodic game that puts the player in charge of managing a tribe of primitive humans on an island. The developers release an update every week with the new episode. Apple had approved 11 previous versions; the 12th was the one they rejected.

The app contained a “gravity” icon depicting a tilted iPhone; the developers were able to obtain confirmation from Apple that this was, in fact, Apple's complaint.

Why can't you depict an iPhone in an iPhone application?

Baby Shaker was a “game” that challenged you to put up with a crying baby for as long as possible before shaking the iPhone (i.e., the baby) to quiet it—whereupon two red Xs would appear over the baby's eyes, indicating that the baby is now dead.

The marketing copy for the game was distasteful, and awareness groups such as the Sarah Jane Brain Foundation were rightly outraged over it. InformationWeek reported that the SJBF were going to protest in front of 15 Apple Stores, although I'm not sure why, since Apple pulled the app.

The developers of this app could have done far better—they could have worked with one of these Shaken-Baby-Syndrome-awareness organizations to develop an app intended to educate people in the consequences of shaking a baby. Instead, they went for “entertainment”.

Even so, I would prefer an iPhone platform that let any developer distribute any app they want, as long as it doesn't cause real harm to real people or things. Anyone who's going to shake a real baby after using this app is going to shake one whether this app exists or not. Poorly aimed as it was, I don't think this app caused any real harm or would have, so I believe it has a right to exist.

Xiao CiDian is a Chinese-to-English dictionary. The developer told me that it includes listings for profane words, and he says that Apple rejected it for this reason.

I suggested resubmitting, and he said that he had actually already done this once before: Apple rejected version 1.0, and he resubmitted it, and Apple approved it the second time. Now Apple has rejected version 1.4, and he says he's not going to try again this time. (The first time, Apple didn't even send him a rejection email, so it wasn't clear why they rejected it then. This time, they did.)

It's not uncommon for dictionaries to include profanity. The jobs of a dictionary are to catalog words and to advise on their usage, and that responsibility covers “dirty” words just as much as “clean” ones. The dictionary that Apple bundles with Mac OS X includes profanity (I tested by searching for “fuck”), as does at least one other English dictionary for the iPhone (although Dictionary by Yuval Frandzel is, notably, “fuck”-free).

He also said that the problematic listings are not new in 1.4—that is, they're in the currently-available version, too. If Apple wants so badly to not distribute any “objectionable content”, then why don't they remove the currently-available version from the store? Better, of course, would be to simply approve the new version.

The image in question is that of an iPhone.

It's not like he's gratuitously abusing it as a logo. The image conveys orienting the iPhone, which is what the button controls (tilt-scrolling). How is Arment supposed to convey that graphically without showing an iPhone? Is he supposed to use a text label?

As Arment notes, this is the same reason why Apple rejected Pocket God earlier in the month.

Apple, as quoted in Trent Reznor's forum post, said that “The objectionable content referenced in this email is ‘The Downward Spiral’.” They didn't specify whether they meant the album or the song; Reznor said that the album wasn't available anywhere in the app, but the song was “in a podcast that can be streamed to the app”.

Either way, what's the problem? Music with naughty words in it? Hello, iTunes Store. Reznor makes essentially the same point in his forum post, with a reference to previous experience with Walmart (which no longer sells NIN records).

Apple changed its mind ten days later, after much press coverage of the rejection. Reznor says the app that's in the Store now is “unchanged”.

iFlash is an application for creating flash cards; version 2.8 and later allow you to export a deck of flash cards to iFlash Touch for viewing on your iPhone or iPod touch.

Initially, Apple simply said that they couldn't get iFlash Touch to work with iFlash. This was because the reviewer tested it with the then-current version 2.7 of iFlash, not the 2.8 pre-release that McGavern had linked to in the submission. (Presumably, McGavern wanted to release iFlash 2.8 and iFlash Touch simultaneously, not one before the other.)

When McGavern called Apple DTS for clarification, the person he talked to told him that iPhone apps cannot require desktop apps. This flew in the face of numerous apps in the Store that require desktop apps, including Apple's own Keynote Remote. Apple rejected iFlash Touch half an hour later, but did not send McGavern an email—he found out about the rejection when he saw it in iTunes Connect.

Apple called McGavern back five days later to inform him of the real reason why they had rejected the app. McGavern pointed out that they should have used the 2.8 pre-release; the person who called him tried it right then, and assured McGavern that they would approve it.

McGavern doesn't identify who called him or even what department he was with, so we don't know whether the caller was with DTS, the review team, or some other part of Apple. If he was a reviewer, that leads to another question: Was this an official call? If so, it marks a significant improvement in Apple policy—it means that Apple has recognized that this sort of conversation is a good thing. If not, then no credit to Apple, but credit to the reviewer for stepping up and doing the right thing.

The developers' first app, Animalizer, allows you to stick your head in place of various animals' heads. For example, you could create an image of a sheep with your head attached. Me So Holy is the same thing, but with images of religious figures (e.g., Jesus) instead of animals.

Strictly speaking, Me So Holy is in violation of the objectionable content rule, which says that “Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.” But then, so is Pocket God. Anything that could offend somebody is in violation of that rule, and there are many such apps in the store today.

Apple really should stop worrying about offending people. Ratings and refunds should take care of the problem for just about everybody.

Drivetrain is a remote control for the BitTorrent client Transmission. It's not a BitTorrent client itself—it's just a remote control for one.

Shouldn't Apple ban all the VNC clients, too? You can “infringe third party [copy]rights” with them just as with Drivetrain.

Trackr, like Drivetrain, was not a BitTorrent client itself, but a remote control for Transmission (and, in Trackr's case, also uTorrent). Trackr's distinguishing feature was that it could add torrents from an RSS feed.

After iLounge reported on Drivetrain's rejection, Muzi contacted them and noted that his own application could serve as an effective replacement. Bad move, as it turns out: Apple told him to remove the feature or see Trackr pulled, and then it appears they pulled it anyway (it's no longer available).

Eucalyptus is a book reader. The “inappropriate sexual content” is a translation of the Kama Sutra—a book.

Sexual content? Certainly. Inappropriate? I think not.

As a number of people have said already, Eucalyptus does not contain the Kama Sutra; it provides an interface for obtaining it (and various other books) over the internet. In other words, this is another “there is swearing/porn on the internet” rejection. (Besides, the Kama Sutra is “sexual content”, but it's not porn; it's more of an instruction manual.)

The developer points to several other apps in the Store right now that appear to conflict with Apple's sensitivity to sexual content. In one direction, there are Eucalyptus's two competitors, Stanza and eReader; both offer the Kama Sutra for download, just as Eucalyptus did (and Stanza includes explicit erotic art as the cover image). In another direction, there are a number of applications showing pictures of, for example, women in bikinis; Montgomerie calls out one specific app (which, amusingly, comes up in a search for “kama sutra” on the App Store) whose description says “Almost x rated, it's not porn”.

He added code to explicitly prevent Eucalyptus from finding the Kama Sutra. Later, an Apple representative contacted him and informed him that he could submit the application without such a filter; that version is now available.