Another day, another dumb App Store rejection. This time, the company rejected an app from Pulitzer-prize winning Marc Fiore because the political cartoon app “contains content that ridicules public figures.”
So, this is horse apples for so many reasons: it’s chilling censorship and it’s completely hypocritical because many of those vaunted news apps feature multiple cartoons that ridicule public figures. What’s even worse is that Apple contacted Fiore and told him to resubmit the app, with the implicit understanding that it will be approved this time due to all the press the rejection drew.
“I feel kind of guilty,” Fiore told The Wall Street Journal. “I’m getting preferential treatment because I got the Pulitzer.”
To a large degree, the app rejection stories are inside baseball – your average iPhone user doesn’t know or care. But these issues have the potential to hurt the selection of the App Store in the long run. The lack of a true, native Google Voice automatically makes the iPhone less appealing for me and a lot of iPhone users are adults who can handle some political satire. With the upcoming 4.0 software, developers are going to bend over backwards to reach the more than 85 million iPhone OS users but this type of Mickey Mouse bullshit is going to drive content creators away, and so is limiting the types of tools they can use.
For all the development problems of Android (fragmentation, relatively weak tools, etc.), the Linux-based OS is rapidly gaining traction. Google said it is seeing activation and sales of nearly 60,000 Android handsets a day, which means there could lead to at least 22 million Android handsets this year alone. The Android Market is also showing signs of growth, as it now has more than 38,000 apps. Yeah, that’s still dwarfed by the more than 180,000 programs in the App Store but it’s not as big of a gap as it could be and, more importantly, the quality of programs in the Android Market are getting much better.
[Via The Wall Street Journal]