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.

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 wouldh rate it R, solely for the two F-words (the limit for PG-13 is 1).

What iTunes really needs is a rating system.