“the Copyright Office rejected Apple’s claim that copyright law prevents people from installing unapproved programs on iPhones: “When one jailbreaks a smartphone in order to make the operating system on that phone interoperable with an independently created application that has not been approved by the maker of the smartphone or the maker of its operating system, the modifications that are made purely for the purpose of such interoperability are fair uses.”"

The Wall Street Journal has some brief coverage, with some interesting stats, notably:

1. Rock Your Phone has seen downloads to 4 million jailbroken phones
2. Jailbroken phones have spent total of $2 million purchasing apps from Rock Your Phone

One thing I’ve noticed a lot in reporting of jailbroken iPhones is that it tends to be entirely USA-centric, due to the news polices of various sites and publications.

This is unhelpful, since Europe had far greater reason to jailbreak. For a year or so (longer in some countries), Europeans could buy iPhones, but the only way to actually use them was to jailbreak them – Apple hadn’t signed any contracts with European telcos.

For a while, it seemed there were more jailbroken phones in Europe than “normal” ones. It would be very interesting to know what the percentages of normal vs jailbreak phones in the different territories. Although … it’s very hard to find ANY info on this subject on Google – you have to page through hundreds of screens of spammers, scammers, etc selling jailbreak kits. The same kits that (usually) are available free from the original programmers…

cannot be posted to the App Store because it is using private or undocumented APIs:

Spi Symbols
proc_name
_NSGetEnviron
As you know, as outlined in the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement section 3.3.1, the use of non-public APIs is not permitted. Before your application can be reviewed by the App Review Team, please resolve this issue and upload a new binary to iTunes Connect.

Sincerely,

iPhone Developer Program

Obviously, this is just a temporary blip (again), and I’m sure it’ll be fixed even sooner than last time; just wait for the next build.

But it highlights a modern risk with 3rd party libs on iPhone that’s probably never going to go away: no matter how diligent and well-resourced your provider, there will probably be times when you will be barred from releasing your apps due to Apple rejecting *their* code. Aside from the frustration, there’s always the risk that the provider *isn’t* fast enough, or skilled enough, to release a fix – and that you (as the developer) are sat around waiting to launch, possibly for weeks. With the current Apple process, you can’t even know whether the library is fixed yet – you have to keep re-submitting and waiting a week or so to find out.

There’s an excellent solution to that problem, of course – one that other platform owners have been using for years: a Partnership Program that allows providers to get Apple to individually bless each particular version of their lib. That way, there would be a lot less risk for developers.

The iPhone is great – unlimited internet access, a decent browser, email, etc. It’s got an almost fully-fledged computer inside there – including the ability to share that internet access with a laptop, if you plug it in (known as “tethering”). Apple has fought long and hard to prevent anyone doing this. Now, a sneaky developer released a tether app – disguised as a Flashlight app:

“Nick Lee’s Handy Light app, which looks like any other flashlight app that uses the iPhone’s screen to provide illumination, actually camouflages a tethering feature using the SOCKS proxy, à la Nullriver’s Software’s NetShare app that was available for a short time nearly two years ago.”

There’s some irony to this – the infamous Flashlight apps, which so many people hate, and which stand as the main example of Apple’s inability to act as a quality-based gatekeeper … being used to sneak in a feature that many people want, except for Apple’s commercial partners.

(AT&T et al are happy for you to tether your phone – they just want to charge you a lot more money for the priviledge. Despite the fact you’re (usually) already paying for the service as part of your main contract)

On the flip-side, it also shows the HUGE flaw with Apple’s “personal judgement” approach to app-rejection: Apple didn’t notice this feature was in there. It is TRIVIAL to fool Apple in this manner, and sneak everything into an app – from hardcore porn to viruses that steal all your addressbook and send it to spam-marketers.

Security, Obscurity, and the ease of deceiving Apple

You can’t blame Apple – the only way you’d know about the secret feature in this app is if someone told you the special order to tap the buttons:

open the Handy Light app and tap the flashlight colors at the bottom in the following sequence: blue, yellow, red. Then tap the top right corner of the screen and the color should change to purple. Your iPhone is now capable of sharing its internet connection with the computer you set up.

…but this just goes to show how weak Apple’s submission process is. There are far more advanced techniques available to developers, that are known to work on iPhone (and to bypass all of Apple’s protection), and which make life much easier for users.

There’s one technique in particular that I believe is still 100% effective in getting you on the app store and Apple would NOT remove your app – even after you went public with the info.

(Not that I’ve tried it. Nor will I try it – no matter how much I may disagree with Apple’s approach, I have no desire to do anything illegal. I’m not even sure this is illegal, it’s probably just “immoral”, but even that is a place I don’t want to go. I try to stick to the spirit of the rules, not just the letter.)

“In fact, we’ve had more apps accepted since this whole thing started on April 8, than before. So that puts it in the realm of several hundreds, if not thousands of apps accepted in the App Store.”

Meanwhile, although the .NET 3D engine – Unity – is also still being accepted, they’re preparing for Apple getting more harsh in future:

“Since Unity’s .NET support may conflict with the new terms of service, we are working on a solution where entire games can be created without any .NET code. In this proposed scenario all the scripting APIs will be exposed to and can be manipulated from C++.
…
We still can’t believe Apple will force developers into choosing a specific language for development. ”

The rankings in the books category of the US iTunes store features 40 out of 50 apps by the same app developer, Thuat Nguyen.

(PLEASE NOTE: The linked website – TNW – has done a neat job of summarising this, but they’re a bit out of their depth on the whole “investigation” side of things. Some of the accusations/insuations they make are patently false, and borderline defamatory (e.g. they apparently know nothing about the multi-billion-dollar “free to play” games industry). Read with caution)

The hack wasn’t subtle. It was very stupidly done – they were guaranteed to get caught within a week, while Apple’s policy is that they wait a month or two before paying developers. The hacker was never going to get the cash. In response to (we suspect) a huge volume of complaints, Apple has now pulled all the developer’s apps:

The developer Thuat Nguyen and his apps were removed from the App Store for violating the developer Program License Agreement, including fraudulent purchase patterns.

Developers do not receive any iTunes confidential customer data when an app is downloaded.

If your credit card or iTunes password is stolen and used on iTunes we recommend that you contact your financial institution and inquire about canceling the card and issuing a chargeback for any unauthorized transactions. We also recommend that you change your iTunes account password immediately. For more information on best practices for password security visit http://www.apple.com/support/itunes.

The evidence was pretty overwhelming, and was accompanied by a stream of ordinary iTunes customers seeing unexpected credit-card transactions:

“Yesterday my credit union contacted me saying there was suspicious activity on my debit card. Sure enough over 10 transactions in the $40-$50 area all on iTunes equaling to $558″

Security notes

Since launching iTunes, Apple has appeared to be pretty weak on customer security.

NOTE: an Apple spokesperson has allegedly stated that they will ask for the verification code on the back of your credit card “a little more often” from now on. Find any security expert and ask them if that’s a solution (hint: expect them to be laughed at).

My company develops iPhone apps, and we are careful that NONE of our iTunes accounts have a credit-card; this is the only online purchasing system in the world that we don’t trust. If you Google “itunes credit card” you’ll find plenty of examples over the years of people claiming that Apple allowed fraudulent iTunes transactions, took the money, and refused to refund, using a legal loophole to keep the cash. While it’s unlikely they ever held the money forever, I’ve met several people in person who’ve made the same claims for themselves, and the sheer volume of complaints strongly suggest Apple’s procedure on this has been less than fair.

So, what to do?

You could setup a secondary bank-account just for iTunes payments (I know a lot of peoople who’ve done that – IIRC, I first heard from one of those who got hacked and had trouble getting Apple to refund or even take it seriously). Or, even less effort, iTunes gift cards are available everywhere – I highly recommend them.

Developer notes

The basic attack here has been possible since the iPhone App Store went live:

Buy multiple iTunes accounts (say 1,000 of them), and buy one copy of your app on each.

This drives you up to the top-10 lists, earning you masses of free publicity and hence sales (plus it allows you to write a thousand 5-star reviews, to similar effect).

It works for two reasons.

Firstly, Apple’s own safeguards against black-hat SEO techniques are surprisingly weak. They’ve made some shockingly naive design decisions on the App Store, e.g. the “rate this app automatically BUT ONLY WHEN YOU DELETE IT” idiocy.

Secondly, Apple’s apparent paranoia and hatred of all things “open” has lead to keeping the App Store a private walled-garden, away from the Internet. This has ensured that *none* of the existing forms of marketing and direct promotion would work. It was only very recently that Apple finally “allowed” normal web browsers to view the pages of the App Store (the pages were always there, that’s how iTunes works – behind the scenes, it’s a web browser).

Net effect: black hat techniques are often not only possible, but also the only option available.

Personally, I believe Apple is changing this for the better. The decision to allow web browsers access to the App Store was huge, and has made it a much better place – e.g. you can now Google your favourite app, instead of using iTunes in-built broken search feature.

But, historically, a lot of people have been pushed into adopting black hat techniques, and it will take a while for them to revert to the mainstream…

“I just got a call from Apple, confirming that they will again be rejecting our resubmitted Tiger Woods Cartoons app.”

Daryl Cagle’s original post (from his previous rejection) gives the full rejection letter. As we’ve come to expect, it’s that arbitrary and poorly-explained Section 3.3.17 yet again:

“we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.17 from the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement which states:

“Applications may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.””

…as an aside: from memory, “in Apple’s reasonable judgement” is a change to earlier versions of this document. If so, it’s an interesting change, because the word “reasonable” is one of those special legal words that has it’s own meaning, above and beyond the dictionary definition. Has something prompted Apple’s lawyers to alter this?

Anyway, back to the app…

What’s wrong with this app? Why is Apple still rejecting it?

“I got a call this afternoon from a representative with Apple’s developer relations. He told me that they are familiar with our apps and are OK with all of our cartoons, including the Tiger Woods cartoons, appearing mixed into our general “msnbc.com Cartoons” app
…
but our Tiger Woods themed editorial app is going too far; Apple remains committed to their policy of not ridiculing public figures.”

“OK with all our cartoons … including [this one] … but [a standalone app] is going too far”? What does that mean? Apple *explicitly* accept the content, and then reject the app for *the content*.

(if they think the app is poorly presented, useless, etc – they could have easily rejected it under one of their other sections. But they didn’t)

As soon as Mark Fiore won a Pulitzer, Steve Jobs declared that the previous rejection “was a mistake”.

We thought (hoped) that meant:

it was a mistake to reject an app on the grounds of simple satire

But the Tiger Woods rejection leads me to suspect a different meaning entirely, a rather more money-focussed one:

it was a mistake to get caught censoring high-brow work of huge artistic/social merit so that the press got excited and exposed our bad behaviour to the public

As far as I know, Apple still hasn’t come out and explained clearly – and publically – why it is that “ridiculing public figures” is grouped with the likes of criminal/illegal activity and obscenity. Until then, we’re free to interpret wildly on what Apple really means. I invite you to invent your own explanations…

Postscript: developer thoughts

While I disagree strongly with Apple’s cited rejection, Daryl’s not all shining white here. Many people have asked “if that’s the case, why don’t you just make Tiger Woods part of the same app? Apple said that’s OK, didn’t they?”

In my experience, Daryl’s response comes down to: “our programmers are too lazy”.

Personally, I’ve made a large number of RSS-based apps, and stitching together multiple feeds is simple if you have decent programmers writing their code properly. Even novice programmers shouldn’t have much difficulty.

In the days before IAP (In-App Purchase), Daryl would have had a great excuse: adding more content to one app, instead of making an extra app, reduces his sales. But this is no longer true – they could very easily charge an IAP price to download “the Tiger Woods module”.

If I were Apple, I would have been tempted to reject the Tiger Woods app for the emotional reason that it’s a crappy app that’s attempting to ride a storm of Google searches for “tiger woods”, and it should have been part of the first app instead. That “should” is from the perspective of: if you’re keeping the App Store high-quality, which Apple at least *tries* to do, albeit with limited success.

(and arguably there may even be a Trademark style rejection reason – is it legal to sell an app that uses Tiger Woods name as the core of its marketing?)

…but let’s not forget: neither of those are the cited reason in Apple’s own correspondence. We have to take Apple at their word. So long as they’re giving poor rejection reasons, we’ll keep holding it against them.

Hopefully this will be the last time an app gets rejected for parodying public figures (since that’s a legally protected right in most Western countries – Apple can reject it, but they can’t be sued for it. So they have no pressing reason to reject it, unlike libel/defamation/obscenity/illegality/etc). In this case, Mark Fiore’s NewsToons app was initially rejected for the infamous “objectionable to Apple” test:

“may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.”

How did this one get overturned?

Well, at first, the developer just gave up. This is tragic, and something I’ve been predicting for a while we’ll see more of: Apple’s terrible process scares-off people who simply want to make good apps:

“mainly because it seemed like it would be so daunting. … It’s not like I had a phone number for someone at Apple,”

…but then, a few months later, when he won a Pulitzer prize for his work – the first online-only cartoonist to do so – he mentioned his previous rejection in public. Great story – pounced on by several news outlets – “Pulitzer says yes, Apple says no”.

Obviously, following the media protest, Apple got on the case and requested the developer to resubmit the app, which duly got approved. As regular followers of AppRejections.com will be well aware, Mark could *probably* have got this accepted just by hassling Apple’s review team over email, and pointing out the error in their rejection. Eventually. If he persisted enough.

However, I really don’t blame him for his actual response. The rejection process is opaque and presents itself as mostly automated and robotic – as Mark points out, he couldn’t even find a contact phone number for the review team (although in his words “interestingly enough, I do now”). Again, regular readers will be aware that those numbers *can* be found, but finding them is often an exercise in tenacity: Apple’s websites are hugely user-unfriendly to developers, seemingly designed to dissuade you from contacting them. Everything funnels you back to buying hardware from the Apple Store .

As I said, hopefully this will be the last such rejection. Hopefully the embarassment over this one (Pulitzer ain’t good for you, Apple? O, RLY?) will be enough to stem the flow. Because otherwise, we’ll continue to see developers self-censoring themsleves, giving up in the face of one of the world’s richest, most powerful, faceless corporations (AAPL). Final words go to Mark:

“Sure, mine might get approved, but what about someone who hasn’t won a Pulitzer and who is maybe making a better political app than mine? Do you need some media frenzy to get an app approved that has political material? I wish they would accept decent political material based on merit, not on popularity”

We’ve had too many legitimate bugfixes rejected from the store because the reviewer of the patch happened to check on a day when someone made a poop joke or our thumbnailer did a particularly good job detecting the raciest image on the page. Nevermind pointing out that the content for the app comes from the web and that we didn’t put the poop joke in there just for them, but all this has been said before and will be said again.

Details here are sketchy, but it’s a sufficiently high profile website I think it’s worth covering. The app isn’t pulled, just killed. They’ve also open-sourced it, making it interresting to watch: its under Conde Nast’s account, and I’d be impressed if CN were brave enough to publish user-submitted code. More likely, you’ll just have to compile it yourself, and install a private copy only on your own phone…

We may finally be approaching the tipping point where Apple’s rough treatment of developers causes significant dents in app revenues. Not “huge” by any means, but perhaps “noticeable”. Apple as a company has never before experienced this – they’ve always been far too small and irrelevant in the mainstream marketplace. As a result, they could look back and say:

Why treat developers as partners? We never have before, and its never harmed us.

Sure, they’ll hate us, and rant, but at the end of the day, we’re their only source of money (we own AND CONTROL the hardware), so they’ll keep coming back

…and that’s entirely true, throughout their corporate history. And they still control the hardware (they made sure of that!) But the rules become different when you’re one of the worlds highest valued companies. Apple swims in a different sea these days…

“Don’t buy this piece of anal waste…..you will murder yourself”

On the one hand … at AppRejections, we feel Apple should never have been refusing “joke” apps – rather they should have been given a clear category of their own.

On the other hand … Apple has consistently, time and time again, refused to allow this kind of app, both paid and unpaid. Why change that now? Why allow a handful of random developers the chance of fame and fortune (free apps make a lot of money too, if done right…), and not even tell the rest of us about it?

Openness: We’ve heard of it

If there were one thing I could change about Apple’s App Store it would be this (even more important than the crappy user-experience: “AppStore” is IMHO one of the worst apps on the iPhone ) :

Apple seems to hate openness; Apple seems to want every mistake airbrushed out of history, and every PR opportunity given a big-up. Apple has never informed developers when they’ve changed their App-Store policies. Apple has probably contributed more to the creation of “crap” iPhone apps than any other company, by their refusal to tell developers what they “should” and “should not” do…

Developer thoughts

Serious lack of quality here. There’s never a valid reason to put a Geo-Location result at (0,0) – the dead giveaway is that users complain about “somewhere in the middle of the ocean”.

lat:0 is the equator, and long:0 is the Greenwich Meridian (i.e. a line north-south through South East London) … they come together just off the south-west shore of Africa, in the Atlantic.

Lat,Long = (0,0) normally means “there’s a bug in your code, go back and test it properly”.

The high number of 1-star ratings from users declaring “I DONT LIVE IN THE OCEAN!!!! THI SAPP DOES NT WORK!!!” (or near enough approximation) suggests the app was probably hacked together in a matter of hours, with minimal testing.