App Rejections

Despite the name, Pussy Lovers is a family-friendly app, containing a bunch of photos of cats. The name – and the description – represent an adult joke, and apparently were enough to get it pulled from the App Store:

I received a call from someone at Apple and he said that the apps were being removed from the store as they were deemed inappropriate for the iTunes Store. … I was told that the title did not match the content and was asked to change the title and the “Education” category.

Anyway, the removal of this app (think of the children!) is all down to that bastion of moral rectitude … Gizmodo. Possibly (probably):

Just hours after we wrote about Tits & Boobies and Pussy Lovers, Apple removed the apps, and called the developer.

Why?

Pulling apart the info, it appears that they’re being rejected for deliberately naming + describing an app in a fashion intended to mislead the purchaser. At the same time, they’ve tried to make it “arguably” legal, placing it in the Education category, and using descriptive text that *could* be interpretted to be factually correct.

(although … it seems their copy writer isn’t that good at English, and they did the parody quite poorly. Maybe if they’d written the text better, so that the App Store description etc were 100% accurate, then things would have been different (although I doubt it))

But, but, but … it’s FREE!

Gizmodo suggests that the price point (free) of the app might have made it acceptable even so.

No. Because iPhone developers can arbitrarily change the price of any app at any time without notice. Bizarrely (just one of many oddities with iTunes Connect), although almost every change to an app requires re-submission, pricing changes (free to paid, or vice versa), require nothing.

So, actually, whenever you see a developer use “but my app is free” as an excuse, feel free to ignore it. I assure you that Apple will.

Why is this all so complicated?

Apple doesn’t like “joke” apps. C.f. “Please don’t ever re-submit this application, we will never accept it”. Unfortunately (for them), rather a lot of them have slipped through onto the store already.

The only guideline we have for this us that apps “must have at least *some* genuine functionality”, although we have a bunch of semi-official lines about e.g. “Cannot pretend to “break” the phone”, etc.

In reality, these are straw-man arguments, the main one being entirely meaningless (how, exactly, do you measure it? How many people must find some value in an app before it is considered non-trivial?). I suspect they are largely just a convenient excuse for when Apple needs to reject something on personal-taste grounds, but want to pretend they’re being objective.

But this is a good thing. In practice, Apple desperately needed some way to reduce the huge volume of bottom-scraping trash produced by the laziest of iPhone developers. With no vetting of developer-status, a sea of rubbish was inevitable, and after a flood of Flashlight apps and similar, Apple eventually started to reject vigorously. The mistake Apple really made was to pretend that the App Store would ever be open, objective, and unfettered.

A fix, for Apple

In the end, I think what Apple really needs here is a Joke category, a home for all these time-waster apps. Simply put, the audience for these apps is out there – look at the success of farting apps, for a start. If “moral guardian for the civilized world” is a part that Apple is ill-suited to play, then “taste-definer” makes no sense at all.

But, at the same time, they need to add a modern Search feature to the App Store. For instance, they’d need to add a way to exclude certain categories when searching for apps, so people who hate the joke apps (like Apple employees, by the looks of things) don’t have to see them…