Apple now censoring dictionaries in the App Store
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
Those pussies at Apple don't realize how badly they've screwed this up. Those cocksuckers need pull their motherfucking heads out of their motherfucking asses, unbunch the panties in their snatch, and start treating their users and developers with the respect they deserve.
Fucking shit pisses me off.
Their core user base for the iPhone seems to be not geeks, but teenage girls. Even if it WAS just geeks, we make up a minuscule percentage of the population. Chances are that if I told one of my sisters, or my mother (who all have iPhones) about this, they would roll their eyes a bit, add an entry or two to the "brother is a conspiracy nut" column, and point me to the latest "omg cute!" app that they downloaded.
The iPhone and the appstore are not going anywhere. If developers like us stop building things for it, people who value cash more than they value principles will take our place.
As much as it sucks, this is the world that we live in.
Unfortunately geekdom was just as taken in as everybody else - perhaps more so and they were disproportionately responsible for it's rapid growth. Geeks are more likely to
- be early apoptors
- blog, tweet, talk about gadgets
- be believed by non geeks when it comes to technical areas and products
Most importantly they are the ones who develop the software that makes the platform actually useful. Without geeks there's no 'App for that'.
This gives them (us) substantial influence. How to you think Firefox gain it's market share. Of course now that the iPhone has momentum they aren't so dependant on the approval of geeks. But over time if they don't attract developers and if they keep removing software then the platform will stagnate. Combine that with geeks putting their weight behind another platform and change could be effected fairly quickly.
The iPhone has reached a point where it isn't going to matter what we say anymore. Look at windows, how long have we all been screaming from the rooftops that it is garbage? How much affect has it had? Some, maybe, sure...but people look at their computers, realize that they can more-or-less get what they need done done, and then they forget about it and go on with their lives.
People are NOT going to give up the iPhone on some silly ideological ground. Yes, this pisses me off, no I won't be buying an iPhone, yes apple is moving further and further away from something that I want, but NONE of this matters to my mom.
Even at the peak of Windows' dominance, Microsoft never forgot that applications were the reason everyone bought a Windows PC instead of a Mac (or 'nix on the server side). No matter how great OS X is, the kids wouldn't be buying Macbooks if they weren't sure it could run Word and $100-\epsilon\%$ of web apps would be usable from Safari or Firefox. Today, people still linger on Windows XP because everything still runs on it.
I don't think any truly killer mobile apps have emerged yet, but when they do, Apple and Google will need to start pampering mobile developers more than they have been.
Most of the population has yet to buy any smartphone. The market is still up for grabs. The non scalability of both the compulsory 'app store' model and the single hardware manufacturer model will inevitably lead Apple to be a niche player just like it is in the world of desktops in my opinion. The only question is how much time this aberration will waste before we can get a proper mobile software ecosystem going.
For so long, that Windows actually became good, and that made the screaming irrelevant. I think that's what's going to happen to the iPhone too.
Version 1.0 was pathetic compared to other modern smartphones, but they released early and with each iteration made it better. Even though it is worse to develop for, the phone is getting better and better.
The issue with a centralized system, of course, is licensing. Microsoft can't really have such a system because every developer wants to do their own thing.
The current structure of the msi installers leaves them much like their exe counterparts. If this is package management then I'm going back to LFS and using make files.
I'd love to see some creative, coordinated protest from the iPhone developer community. The best conference protest I can remember was when indigenous Australians stood up and turned their backs on our former Prime Minister John Howard. Imagine if that happened at Apple's WWDC, it would send a powerful and embarrassing message.
Apple is becoming increasingly belligerent and rely on the fanatical loyalty of their developers to simply keep taking it. At some point it's time to take your hand off the stove.
I personally don't think that this is true. I don't think they did develop the full SDK for the iPhone from the point when the reaction to "Safari only apps" was bad. They just were not finished with the SDK. Apple does this a lot. They only release stuff which is reasonably ready to be released. A half-assed release of the SDK would have been worse than a late SDK IMHO.
It worked for Wal-Mart.
I tend to think of the core Apple demographic heavily overlapping the Daily Show with John Stewart demographic. And can you imagine how much fun Stewart could have with them, and how quickly Apple could go from the hip and cool tech company to the uncool, busy body, Sarah Palin censoring books in Alaska libraries company?
Remove that love and you're left with a mobile consumer market as full of ingenuity as the business of custom-tailoring b2b enterprise applications.
As this thread makes clear, there are ample other platforms if we dislike Apple's policies. Anyone is free to purchase, or develop for, Android or Windows Mobile or RIM.
Government regulation is a whole other animal, because they ensure that there cannot be any alternative to compete and let the best idea win. That's the problem with government action, but that's also a different discussion.
Sure if you hit em with a stick for a bit they might relent but there would be a struggle.
"I feel like Apple should rate their new iDisk-access app
for iPhone "17+," since my iDisk is full of porn. It's
only fair."
Priceless.
Apple is working really, really hard to crank up the market pressure and to make Android a very lucrative, unrestricted cross-device choice of platform for all those totally pissed off by iPhone's AppStore.
I wonder what it's like having a day NOT seeing anyone blog a rant about Apple and AppStore.
I've toyed with the idea of developing iPhone apps. But after these last few weeks, I'd be much more inclined to learn the Android API. Sure, the iPhone has a larger user-base right now, but there are dozens of Android handsets scheduled to be released in 2010.
All those developers.
I wonder what it's like having a day NOT seeing anyone blog a rant about Apple and AppStore.
It's like spending a day not reading blogs about software development.
Like it or not, Apple's popularity has made the iBrand fairly self-sufficient by now, and its going to take a lot more than a couple of unjustly-pulled apps to derail that train off the pop-culture tracks.
If Apple is behaving like a jerk, why invest any energy in them? AFAIK there are other interesting developing platforms with interesting hardware. The iPhone might have a nice userbase, but I presume this will not matter in the end since most phones seem to head into the direction of being complete pc's anyway, why bother with a mobile 'desktop' application as new mobile browsers are going to be supporting more and more of the common desktop pc browsers features?
I mean - excuse my ignorance - , but why would a developer voluntarily deal with the ongoing Apple App store dictatorship? Without a healthy ecosystem of applications the iPhone is dead in the water. As is the current silo approach embraced by Apple. Why would a developer invest any energy into their doomed silo scheme?
IMHO let Apple reject applications as much as they want, history has learned us that the most open system will prevail (Video2000 Vs VHS for example) and my bet is on the Web and open OSses like Android, Linux and perhaps Symbian (if the ever get serious about going FLOSS).
history has learned us that the most open system will prevail
The truth is that the iPhone would be a dream to develop for were it not for the draconian app store processes. I love Cocoa, and UIKit (aka Cocoa Touch) is equally clean to work with.
Also, there's no real solid indication as yet that Android is going to be worlds better, ditto for the Pre. We're all hopeful, especially given the heavy OSS roots of those platforms, but in the end they could have similar dumb restrictions on the hardware from the carriers and we'd end up equally screwed.
I think the hardest part to understand is that we all know that Jobs will come down on people who make mistakes with furious anger. He will protect those he agrees with even in the face of public outrage. We can also assume that Jobs is aware of what the App store reviewers are doing. Knowing all of this, we can only assume that they are doing what they do with his blessing.
That's the thing I can't reconcile. I keep waiting for an explanation, but I'm thinking its going to be a while.
Also I also think he nailed it with the last line in the story-telling sense.
"Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to purchase a censored dictionary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day."
So my dictionary now appears to have "Frequent/intense sexual content or nudity" because the review team tried to translate bad words.
In a moment of frustration, sent a sarcastic quip to Apple's review team about not allowing dictionaries to minors, and I'm left wondering if that knocked me into the slow queue - because it took well over a month to finally get the update approved.
For the initial rating, I said it had no bad language, sex, or violence.
It got rejected for language (apparently, the first the reviewers do is try to use four-letter words).
So I changed the rating to "mild/infrequent" and it got rejected again.
Here's part of what I wrote to them after the second rejection:
"I'm not sure how to respond to your comment that the rating is inappropriate.
"Nihongo" is a Japanese dictionary.
As such, it contains some profanity, sexual content, etc. but the bulk of the content is not in that category."
That got no reply from Apple, so I went back, used the strongest possible rating (like Ninja Words, it's now rated 17+).
More than a month after it was first posted, it was approved for sale.
Don't Allow Apps
4+
9+
12+
17+
Allow All Apps
Nothing has gone right. Even the new hardware and OS launches, which should have been all good news, were marred by bad PR. So far, all of these missteps haven't seriously hurt the bottom line. But, if Apple stays on this trajectory, isn't it only a matter of time?
Wasn't the idea to allow finer-grained control over the content allowed on a given iPod/iPhone than was possible previously?
Why can't they allow filtering over the sub-categories rather than just the broad labels? There's a world of difference between "obscene" words and graphic pornography.
Apple needs to do something really quick before things go out of their hand.
If Steve had been full throttle over the last year, he would have personally vetted the first 500 apps, and carefully trained a couple lackeys to predict his innate reaction so well that they could proxy for him for 90% of the submissions (those from unknowns). Steve would have personally handled the 5 or 10% from developers deemed important enough to not completely piss off. This is how he's run the company since his return (and probably how he ran it in the first place).
In my experience negotiating with Apple, it was like talking to the staff of a very famous and influential person, rather than talking to people at a company with a normal distribution of responsibility. Everyone could give you an opinion or best guess about what might transpire, but absolutely nothing could be decided one way or another without the direct involvement of Steve.
I think they're in for a very rough period if/when Steve leaves. Obviously the app store has fallen off his radar or we wouldn't be seeing this kind of bullshit. It's all a factor of his personal bandwidth, which has obviously been impacted by his health.
At least HN is (and hopefully it will remain) free of stupid Apple censorship.
My guess would be that the reason they're acting like they are, is that they have to strictly enforce the rules as they are written.
If they make exceptions or even approve an app that doesn't conform 100%; could that not later be used as a prior art opening up all sorts of discussions/legal-nastyness?
If they rephrased the rules such that they could use their own best judgement on a case-by-case basis, the discussions would just be bigger when one app gets approved and another one doesn't.
At least this way, it should be fairly clear as an app developer whether your app will get approved or not: If they can find anything "bad" in it, it won't.
Please, let's keep it that way. Their process is random, it conforms 100% to rapid cycling between capricious fascism and complete lack of attention. What they are doing seems almost designed to piss off the maximum number of developers, thus vastly increasing the probability of lawsuits and bad press.
Face it people, Apple is just completely screwing up. Get over it, they're human like everyone else.
How long will Apple get away with this?
In any case, there's a lot to be said for, "You know, our App Store approval model just doesn't work, so we're abandoning it. From now on, it's open and transparent all the way."