Jon Atherton managed to get a detailed response from Apple over what’s not allowed:

1. No images of women in bikinis (Ice skating tights are not OK either)

2. No images of men in bikinis! (I didn’t ask about Ice Skating tights for men)

3. No skin (he seriously said this) (I asked if a Burqa was OK, and the Apple guy got angry)

Dear [developer],
The App Store continues to evolve, and as such, we are constantly refining our guidelines. Your application, [app name], contains content that we had originally believed to be suitable for distribution. However, we have recently received numerous complaints from our customers about this type of content, and have changed our guidelines appropriately.
We have decided to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store, which includes your application.
Thank you for your understanding in this matter. If you believe you can make the necessary changes so that [app name] complies with our recent changes, we encourage you to do so and resubmit for review.
Sincerely,
iPhone App Review

Affected developers are – no surprise – angry. Not so much for Apple’s anti-sex stance (although for all those of us who live in normal countries where we actually have sex … i.e. not the USA … the anti-sex stance is the subject of much ridicule), but for the way Apple has seemingly set them up and then betrayed them.

Expectation Management in a World Without Rules

The key issue is that Apple still *refuses* to tell anyone what the rules are for the App store. So … everyone has to “infer” and “imply” from Apple’s overt actions.

(of course, that’s the whole reason behind this website, App Rejections – to document those actions and help developers second-guess Apple’s policies)

Apple originally Rejected all adult-themed apps, and anything that remotely implied sex or sexual activity. Early last year, they introduced an age-rating system, and soon stated allowing those apps that had been previously rejected. There are some major flaws with the age-rating system – Apple has frequently rejected any app that includes embedded weblinks unless the authors rate it as “Age 17+” – but on the whole it seems to have reduced the volume of unreasonable rejections.

Now, with the App Store full of apps with titles containing “Boobs”, “Sex”, “Bikini”, etc – most of which are just photos no stronger than those you’d see in any lingerie catalogue – Apple unilaterally decides to ban all such apps.

The Wobble iBoobs app is particularly interesting: this app contains zero sexual content. It is an app that allows you to convert photos you already possess to have stronger sexual content – but only if they’re already sexual (try sticking fake boobs on a photo of a brick wall; not sexy).

But even this has fallen foul of the mass ban:

it’s not like Wobble isn’t *known* to Apple – they have paid us almost $300,000 more in AUD and it’s been installed 970,000 times (inc the free version)!!
…
average rating by users of 4 star [the vast majority of the ratings are 5 star]

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spammedy Spam

Reports from developers suggest that Apple forgot to tell their PR department what they did:

“Whenever we receive customer complaints about objectionable content we review them. If we find apps that contain inappropriate material we remove them from the App Store and request the developer to make any necessary changes to their apps in order to be distributed by Apple.”

If that’s a genuine strategy, it’s pathetic (clearly, it’s not – this is just a default-PR statement, while they wait to be told by the rest of the company what just happened). As a platform-owner, *you* make the decisions, and Apple has shown thousands of times already that it’s more than happy to make those decisions arbitarily, without reference to any public process.

No … I suspect this is more to do with the vast number of crummy “bikini” and “swimsuit girls” apps that have appeared on the App store over the past few months. It’s had that feeling of deja-vu, back when there was a rash of “flashlight” apps (and, later, “farting” apps trying to cash-in).

The spam is a real problem: Apple has no public process for vetting submissions, nad has repeatedly shown themselves inadequate to the task of balancing between quality and freedom … and so has no credibility when they try to maintain a standard. I suspect the current wave of bans is a knee-jerk reaction to try and correct what they consider were their own mistakes over recent months.

Followups

Techcrunch was alerted, and then ran a followup playing the “Censorship!” (Um … wake up, TechCrunch! You’re a bit slow if you’re crying foul over censorship only *now*). That should bring a lot more attention to the topic, which is good.

I also spotted an InformationWeek article, that had a lot more detail, including some interesting quotes from developers and customer complaints (incidentally – all the links to Apple websites in the IW article are now dead … has Apple pulled them in response to the article? Ouch).

“…It would be appropriate to provide official rules of the contest within the application which clearly state that that Apple is not a sponsor of, or responsible for conducting, the promotion.”

NB: Hipstamatic is “mostly” a camera-app that applies funky post-processing to your pics to make them look more interesting; the monthly conference is very much a secondary feature (alongside facebook integration, etc). It’s not as if the contest was the main thing about this app.

I expect to see a lot more app including contests in the months to come, as more marketing agencies get their teeth into the iPhon.

Apple’s only answer was that we would “need to remove the section on jailbreaking.”

What’s the offending text? Does it have source code? A step by step guide?

“Exactly what does my book say about jailbreaking? There is a 4 page section (in a 200 page book) that explains the risks of jailbreaking — such as it may void your warranty and “may lead to problems using your iPhone, such as crashes or even startup failures.” Apple publicly offers this same advice in a support article on jailbreaking.
…
The problematic material, if there was any, is where I discuss the potential advantages of jailbreaking and offer a brief subsection titled “How to Jailbreak.” Despite the title, the subsection does not provide step-by-step instructions. Rather, it offers only a vague description of the jailbreak process, noting: “Describing how to jailbreak an iPhone for a book like this is an exercise in futility.”"

Read the linked article for full details, but removing the “How to” section wasn’t enough. The author has an interesting side-point; he didnt believe the claim that Jailbreaking broke the Developer License Agreement, and did some careful reading of said license:

“Apple’s License Agreement includes a catch-all clause that amounts to a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card for the company, allowing it to do whatever it wants: “Apple may…reject Your Application for distribution for any reason, even if Your Application meets the Documentation and Program Requirements.”

In other words, Apple can reject your app even if it is not in violation of any specific clause in the License Agreement. Apple doesn’t even have to provide a rationale for its decision. Apple can basically tell you: “We reject your app. We’re not going to tell you why. We’re not going to tell you what, if anything, you can do to revise the app that would change our decision. It doesn’t even matter if another app already in the Store includes the same material that is the basis for our rejection here. And there’s not a thing you can do about it. So get lost.”"

The application allowed users to create their own card from scratch, customising the background and pictures before adding a personal message to the recipient. It would then be sent to the object of their devotion through Appsie’s server, using a generic “secret Valentine” e-mail address to keep the sender’s identity a mystery.

The developer claims it was all above-board, and that every message was moderated:

“I think their concern would be that people could send a message to someone with a hate message or bullying, or even potentially spamming them.

“But we did point out to them that we’re actually monitoring all the e-cards being sent. We have a system where we can review all the e-cards that are generated ourselves, and delete the ones that are nasty, if there were any.”

Then again, I saw one report that used the term “spoofing”; if they were indeed spoofing the from address, that’s a bit more serious. It’s trivial to do, but I can see that Apple wouldn’t want you doing a spoofed send from your device. Not that it really matters – anyone who cares about spoofing would normally block it at the mailserver (which means in this case: 90% or more of the “Secret Valentine” emails would be automatically deleted by the receiving mailserver, and would never reach the recipients).

“Sling Media was willing to work with us to revise the app to make it more bandwidth sensitive,” AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega said in a statement. “They made important changes to more efficiently use 3G network bandwidth and conserve wireless spectrum so that we were able to support the app on our 3G mobile broadband network.”

…but, what’s this? Sling Media denies making any changes at all for AT&T:

Sling Media’s John Santoro told Ars that no fundamental changes were required. “AT&T never discussed any specific requirements with us.”

Oh dear. I wonder what happened? Maybe, this:

1. AT&T told Apple to reject the app last year (April 2009), because their network couldn’t cope with it (or, more to the point, they *feared* the network couldn’t cope – it might actually have been fine, who knows?)
2. Apple rejected the app
3. Apple started allowing other bandwidth-intensive apps
4. AT&T worked with the app authors; my guess: someone senior at AT&T said “we have to approve this; it’s a PR disaster; get it fixed!”, and the folks in charge of the network laid down a harsh set of testing requirements that the app would have to meet “or else it happens over my dead body”
5. App gets through AT&T’s reqs fine; it would seem that AT&T’s network *could* handle the app in the first place
6. AT&T marketing folks attempt to shift the blame to the smaller company; they hope to hide their internal communications/political wars by pointing to someone else

There’s a less charitable explanation, of course…

Given the widely-reported public outrage at AT&T’s 3G network under-performing/failing repeatedly last year in major US cities … maybe AT&T’s network really was too weak to handle the loads that this app (and others) would provide. But now … it’s good enough.

How much can you upgrade a network in 9 months? Especially when you’ve got the bank-account and resources of AT&T? Hmm…

(honestly, I have no idea – I live in Europe. We had “real” 3G networks from the start, apparently. I guess it’s one of the benefits of living in a part of the world where Mobile has been taken seriously over the past few decades…)

And, PS: didn’t Apple last year explicitly deny allowing any partner to make app acceptance/rejection decisions, or did I imagine that?

We’ve reviewed your application Battle for Wesnoth: The South Guard 1.3 and determined that because this application does not have Core Location user features but is requesting location data, it violates section 3.3.6 of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement:
…
Applications using Core Location information must provide user benefit and cannot solely be enabled to allow mobile advertisers to deliver targeted advertisements based on user’s location.

A few points of interest here:

1. OpenFeint is/was mostly transparent to developers – OpenFeint features are controlled by *OpenFeint*, not by the developer of the app you’re running. Most things come from the OF servers, including the user settings (if I remember correctly – NB: I haven’t checked this recently). Compare this to AdMob, where the developer has direct control over the Location-tracking inside their own source code.
2. OF does *additionally* serve ads internally (but it’s mostly a social network, as noted – not an ad network)
3. OF is taking it seriously – witness the PR scramble on the linked thread, robustly promising “I will reach out to my contacts at Apple”
4. The affected app finally got accepted by Apple – Battle for Wesnoth
5. …even after all that, there are still claims of Apple continuing to reject OpenFeint apps

I got the following email after submitting an update to an app already in the App Store.

We’ve reviewed your application Scripture Only and determined that because this application does not have Core Location user features but is requesting location data, it violates section 3.3.6 of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement:

This is in there because of AdMob, and it told me to add that Core Location Framework to my code.

Of course, AdMob et al have been advising developers to disable the location-checks (usually this is a 10-second fix for developers). This is no big problem – although the ad-network documentation pages tend to be even worse than Apple’s, the libraries themselves are so simple to use that it’s usually easy to work out what to change and where.

Interesting that the rejections have started so soon, apparently “effective immediately”.

(for the record, I hate the way apps have been so aggresive about asking for location, especially the ad networks, chasing higher profits – and indeed it’s arguably illegal in Europe, since there are no age-checks, but no-one has bothered to stop and think about that. I’m very glad to see Apple rejecting based on pointless location checks; no-one should be tracking location without very good reason)

During our review of your application, we found that your application contains inappropriate or irrelevant platform information in the Application Description and/or Release Notes sections.

Providing future platform compatibility plans or other general platform references are not relevant in the context of the iPhone App Store. While your application has not been rejected, it would be appropriate to remove “Finalist in Google’s Android Developer’s Challenge!” from the Application Description.

Please log into iTunes Connect to make appropriate changes to the Application Description now to avoid an interruption in the availability of Flash of Genius: SAT Vocab 2.2 on the iPhone App Store.

“avoid an interruption in the availability”

What?

What does that mean?

Is this the new “REJECTED”?

I have a horrible feeling about this. If Apple claims from now on that “we never rejected X, we merely told them that “it would be a good idea to re-submit”", they can get away with a lot more. This shifts the grey-area between fair and unfair, to encompass more of whatever Apple doesn’t like.

I suspect that this is legal wrangling after all the trouble Apple got into with the FCC over rejecting Google’s VoIP app. I hope this is a one-off incident, but we’ll keep an eye on it…

Marketing

What are developers supposed to do?

Apple used to allow “special” and/or “paying” developers to customize their iTunes pages (rumours I heard at the time suggested that it was a paid service, although perhaps indirectly). But that’s long disappeared, and now we have even less control over what marketing is possible via the app store.

Ultimately, the single greatest value in the App Store is that it provides a marketing / discovery platform. That’s rapidly followed by the ability to extort cash from consumers – but with Apple’s 30% charge, there are much much cheaper ways to get money, as used by millions of websites every day.

Developers may rant; developers may resent Apple. But money is a higher issue.

Is Apple now shooting itself in the foot? Is this one of the cracks that Google, RIM, and Nokia will sneak through?

“Apple actually rejected the application at first because it was too simple,” Shelnutt says. “I had to contact Apple and explained the need for it to be simple for easy access on duty.”

Personally, I dislike the sea of crap that stems from the vast range of copycat and trivial applications. And there are surely greatly more useful, and only slightly more complex apps, that could easily be made for use by police forces.

Even more so when people attach a 99cent charge to stuff that any number of iphone developers would happily do for free, if only someone had bothered to ask them.

But … look at the ratings. 5 ratings, and all of them 5 stars. Undeniably, this is an app that someone – somewhere – genuinely wanted, and was happy to pay for. Assuming of course that it’s not just a crude attempt at vote-stuffing, which it easily could be (a widespread practice, so long as you keep under the radar and don’t bring yourself to Apple’s attention)

Incidentally, there’s another app that predates this one by a month or so, identical in features, with a better name – but with *even less* usability (the words are formatted poorly, and it adds a tacky background image). I find myself wondering if the enterprising author of POLICE MIRANDA WARNING was simply so disappointed by it that he decided to make his own.

…and that’s where Apple’s “test of simplicity” fails: it blocks iteration and innovation.

I *like* platforms where there’s at least some filtering that keeps the worst of the crap away, so … what could we do that’s better? Well, there’s a lot of options from the world of Web 2.0 – we’ve recently had 10 energetic years of innovation in community-managed rating systems, most of which Apple has so far ignored.