GreatFire is tracking Apple iOS applications for instances of censorship
applecensorship.com
applecensorship.com
But, personally, I still think this is a great idea!
It has nothing to do with Apple or censorship.
Pity for expats (like me).
Ideally apps that have regional restrictions should be able to declare that and then when you do a search it would not show results outside of the scope unless you searched for the exact name or enabled outside of region search.
Users are partly to blame too, selling an untranslated app in France will bring down tons of 1 star reviews specifically calling out lack of French version. I suppose some developers just decide to not deal with that and retire the app from the store.
I had to restrict each of them to their own country (i.e. preventing German users from reaching the French app), otherwise during the app-store submission reviews, the reviewer would reject us because according to them the app being reviewed is a ripoff of the other apps of the same account.
It's like:
Your app "Gmail UK" is a ripoff of another app of the store: "Gmail US".
Lots of apps aren't available in China or outside of where the developer is based.
Greatfire is right: Apple could indeed take a stand for freedom - if the shareholders demanded it and and were willing to shut down Apple's iPhone sales and manufacturing business, which is responsible for the bulk of Apple's income and profits.
Google famously left China, but Google is more of an advertising company than a hardware company.
We do know, however, that Apple does certain certain apps and functionality on device for China. Censorship of the News app is one such example: https://www.larrysalibra.com/how-apple-censors-news-in-china
There's a reason why centrally curated platforms are dangerous, and why Free Software Principals reject them.
What's with the downvotes? More censorship?
For context, the app was created to track human rights abuses during the disclosure of the US's covert surveillance and assassination program in the Middle East. This was a scandal for the United States because it was disclosed that they were killing innocent people with knowledge and through reclassification, even killing children (internally using the terminology "fun sized terrorists").
The pressure to remove the app was brought to Apple during a sweep to control the scandal and public perception of the program.
(Given the public conversation has moves far past the scandal, and the Trump administration continues the indiscriminate assassinations, that censorship program does seem to have succeeded)
It's also a fairly low-value proposition for a native app, in my opinion. It's really the kind of content worthy of a web page, that's about it. Not sure that contributes to Apple's vendetta against it, however.
I agree with you, and think its endemic of the app ecosystem.
Ease of use, easy of discovery, learning curves, etc.
General -> VPN -> add configuration and entering
- Server
- remote ID
- Username
- Password
This is less setup than adding an email account.
They may have heard of so-and-so app, install it, and boom, it works. That's very appealing, especially if it's a custom protocol that is supposedly harder to detect.
Or maybe their grandkids have set it up for them, and don't want it to be any harder than it needs to be. Yada yada.
It's not really hard to come up with answers like this. The two options aren't "complete expert" and "blithering idiot".
I regularly jump between UK, US and France in my VPN app.
The only sensible reasons I could see for an app are either to deliver the content to the user in the manner the user is most accustomed to, or to be able to integrate billing as in-app subscriptions, etc.
Trademarks are intended to provide consumers with the confidence that the products they're buying really come from the producer they claim to come from. As such, you're prohibited from assembling your own computer and branding it Apple; you've never been prohibited from referring to Apple.
In summary:
"If “Super Bowl” is used by an individual or business to describe the event and not used for commercial intent, then individuals and businesses can use the term. For example, a grocery store can say “Make sure to stock up on chips for the Super Bowl” but the store cannot say they are the “Official Super Bowl Chip Stop.”"
That said, you can just avoid infringing entirely by calling it The Big Game
Maybe everyone is afraid to be first into the breach, like so many avoided using "Happy Birthday to You" for decades in fear of the bogus, broad copyright claim
"Even if [the] use is commercial, it must still lead to a likelihood of confusion to be violative of the Lanham Act. 15 U.S.C. § 1114(1). In Planned Parenthood, the defendant used the plaintiff's trade name as a domain name, without the qualifying moniker 'sucks,' or any other such addendum to indicate that the plaintiff was not the proprietor of the website. In contrast, 'taubmansucks.com' removes any confusion as to source. We find no possibility of confusion and no Lanham Act violation."
Additionally, this doesn't show the endless number of apps that Apple censored from all countries' iOS app stores because they contained or might contain images of human bodies.
It's not something the site can do, but it's important to remember that this is just the tip of the iceberg: at least in China they are required by law to block e.g. VPN apps; no such equivalent law requires them to ban apps that contain nipples in the United States; that censorship is entirely voluntary.
For example, a christian religious group might take offence to software containing other religions, and if that group is big enough, they might consider not buying anything from a company until a change is made. This basically goes for any subject and any group, but in the case of the USA, a lot of normal things are considered taboo by many groups of people (i.e. sex ed / sex health / pictures of bodies / alcohol / everything that is not american). Because some of those groups can be very large and very influential, 'normal' things get banned or ignored by those groups and as a result less money is to be made.
Is that true? Because that would cut out the Tumblr, Imgur, Reddit, Flickr, Twitter, etc. apps. And those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
Steve Jobs once famously cited iOS as having “freedom from porn”, and went on to say that people would care more about it being blocked “when you have kids”.
For being a California peacemonger, he missed out on big swaths of being a hippie.
No, that was almost certainly because of SESTA/FOSTA and was underway well before they had their child porn snafu that got them temporarily booted from the App Store.