App Rejections

Wurlit is one of many apps that allow you to find apps on the app store that you might wish to buy. Apple provides all the app names and info as a public resource on the web and internet. So, it would be fair enough to use that info to improve the app, right? To help people find more apps, and buy more? But, no. The latest update has been rejected:

Thank you for submitting your application to the App Store. Unfortunately, your application, Wurlit Apps 3d, cannot be added to the App Store because it violates section 3.3.7 of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement:

“Applications may not perform any functions or link to any content or use any robot, spider, site search or other retrieval application or device to scrape, retrieve or index services provided by Apple or its licensors, or to collect, disseminate or use information about users for any unauthorized purpose. “

There is no public API allowing information from iTunes to be used in the manner demonstrated by your application.

I have no idea precisely which data Wurlit was scraping – but I’m fairly sure that some of the most famous and heavily promoted apps on the App Store do precisely this (and – if so – Apple well knows it!).

But aside from that, the above phrase from Apple is disturbing: they’re essentially saying “we want to switch-off the world wide web; we’d want to make it into a private, paid-for service, where site owners are able to sidestep the laws of publishing”. As far as I am aware, they cannot legally prevent people from doing any of this on the web itself (although IANAL) – but with the captive audience of iphone developers, they appear to be flexing their muscles and going for it. Restricting the core freedoms of the internet. For a company that’s one of the five most valuable in the USA (by market cap.), that’s a worrying direction to be taking…