We all know the Apple Inc. App Store is a fickle entity, with a nebulously worded anti-salaciousness clause. But is it trying to police the whole Internet for bad language? This week the App Store’s policy was brought under scrutiny when it didn’t at first approve an update to the application known as Tweetie, prompting many in the media to call out Apple for censorship.
The case: Tweetie is an existing—and popular—application that brings Twitter feeds to the iPhone. Its creators issued a new version, which was rejected. The reason given by Apple? Some Twitter feeds—known as Tweets—might, gasp, contain cursing. Imagine: someone using a @#%^&*!! obscenity? On the Web?
The implication in this case was that Apple isn’t going to support applications that might give access to people’s online blogs, postings, status updates, etc. if there’s a suspicion those postings might contain a bad word or several. Could Apple actually want to police people’s social networking information? The media had a field day attempting to answer this question this week.
But then, late last night Apple did finally approve the update. And the whole debacle shines yet another light on the issues with the App Store approval process.
Rather than a Big Brother play, the issue seems to be scale. Approving all those lucrative apps is testing the store’s ability to handle volume. There are 25,000 applications on offer right now, several of which are updated every day. Then there are new apps coming in. Rather than live people reviewing submissions from developers, a logical conclusion would be that a software bot combs through them first to separate the wheat from the cursing chaff, as it were. And unfortunately some apps will get caught in the hopper.
There’s no doubt Apple is making money off the App Store, now that it has millions of downloads under its belt. It might want to spend some of that to correct this glitch—if nothing else than to make developers happy, plus avoid the bad publicity and cries of “censorship” that come with it.
