Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Jailbreaking *is* legal – US Library of Congress
The US Copyright Office has declared that jailbreaking your iPhone is legal under Copyright law / DMCA – (although note: Apple could still go to court to challenge this):
“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 [...]
LIBRARY REJECTED: Unity3D (for private APIs. Again!)
Oops. Looks like Unity isn’t doing enough regression testing / unit testing on their codebase. The same piece of .NET that got Unity rejected – temporarily – almost a year ago has resurfaced in the Unity 3.0 Beta:
cannot be posted to the App Store because it is using private or undocumented APIs:
Spi Symbols
proc_name
_NSGetEnviron
As you [...]
ACCEPTED: Handy Light (despite concealing banned features)
(NB: in the time between researching this and publishing it, someone at Apple read the news – or was tipped-off – and the app has already been pulled)
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 [...]
LIBRARY ACCEPTED: Titanium, Unity3D (despite being “not C”)
Too many examples to list individually, but in light of Steve Jobs’ anti-Flash rant a few months back, Appcelerator is claiming no slowdown in the number of apps approved that use Titanium:
“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 [...]
PULLED: 41 of Top-50 Books apps (fraud + hacked iTunes accounts)
From Day 1 of the iPhone App Store, it’s been possible and profitable to push your apps up the rankings by buying them in bulk yourself (requires you to buy mulitple iTunes accounts). Now an Asian developer has gone one further, by hacking other people’s accounts to do the purchasing:
The rankings in the books category [...]
Video: “The App Store has Rejected Your Application”
Downfall meets Apple (note: strong language):
REJECTED: Tiger Woods Cartoons (for ridiculing public figures)
Another political rejection, with a twist. My earlier hopes were short-lived; even after the embarassment of rejecting a Pulitzer-winning cartoonist, within weeks Apple was rejecting cartoon apps again, for the same (non-)reason. In this case, it’s an app showing newspaper and web cartoons of Tiger Woods:
“I just got a call from Apple, confirming that they [...]
OVERTURNED: NewsToons (for ridiculing public figures)
[editor note: catching up on old submissions in the queue, this one is a couple of months old]
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 [...]
ABANDONED: iReddit (for unfair rejections)
Reddit.com has long had an iPhone app (iReddit), but has finally given up on the app store, after one-too-many mistaken rejections by Apple:
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 [...]
ACCEPTED: Cell Phone Tracker (fake app)
This is fascinating. Here we have an app that not only deceives in the app name (it doesn’t “track cell phones” – this may be pedantic, BUT … misnaming an app has been a cause of rejection over the past few years), but does nothing else of any use or value. It’s a joke app. [...]