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Apple Rejects Nine Inch Nails iPhone App
jarrettwold2002 writes "Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails announced via his Twitter account today, 'Apple rejects the NIN iPhone update because it contains objectionable content. The objectionable content referenced is "The Downward Spiral."' The initial NIN Access iPhone app garnered much fanfare (Wired article, Guardian article) and was approved by Apple. The update has been rejected due to an album reference. If Nine Inch Nails is having problems with censorship and approval what kind of problems are you having with the iPhone app approval process?"
Looking at his Twitter feed, who woulda thought that Trent would be such a boring twit?
Oh, so THAT'S how it got its name.
Hey if Apple wants to reject a killer app from one of the most popular contemporary artists I guess that is their prerogative. Pretty stupid effiing move, and I guess Trent will have to take his application (and devoted money spending fans) elsewhere I guess...
Which of those links has TFA in question? 140 bytes of twitter? A you tube video. WTF is so bad about "downward spiral"? I'd RTFA if there was one.
Just callin' it like I see it.
With jailbreaking it, I don't have problems at all. I can write my own programs using free software, upload them without paying $150 to access my own device, and share them with my friends. I can do a lot more than Apple would let me in their walled garden. The only question is how soon untill mainstream companies/groups like NIN release their promotional apps on the distribution channels for jailbroken iPhones.
Now Trent has publicly stated the reason for it's rejection, does that not break Apple's NDA rules on "don't talk about rejection"? Will Apple throw more PR petrol on themselves by fighting Trent with a lawsuit instead of trying to let the embers die out?
Is anyone really surprised with another Apple rejection on dubious grounds? Perhaps the real message is that Apple design their products for good church going people who would rather vote Democrat than see anything with a little adult content. The way I see it, is that there are a LOT more "adult" users who would rather have the choice of content, even if they wouldn't consume it themselves. This means that Apple are seemingly intentionally cutting themselves off from that spending power.
We complain rightly about government treating us like children, making our decisions for us with little right of reply, yet it seems if you stick a flashy interface on it and apply some PR brainwashing it's all good and dandy.
For the Apple fanbois, feel free to mod me down for speaking ill of the almighty......the power of Jobs compels thee.
I'm not really into NIN but I watched the Youtube video explaining what the app is. This is something Apple should be promoting because it does a pretty good job of taking advantage of the platform's capabilities - not suppressing because it contains a reference to a 15-year old album.
Fuck any platform where the vendor must approve content. (In this case that means fuck Apple, which immediately means I get modded up and down until the fanboi zealots are the only ones modding and I end up with a -1).
We've seen open platforms dwindle in past years. PC gaming is in decline. Most consoles need all manner of hack and mod to run home brew content. Hell even GPS APIs (like TomToms) have been discontinued on newer models. We've gone from a society of tinkerers where the best idea wins to an increasingly IP law based profit model that stiffles innovation.
Hell I don't even understand why objectionable content needs to be censored like this. For the most part don't buy it if you're offended. For the truely heinous stuff like that shake a baby to death iPhone app that was in the news lately, existing laws should be brought to bear if applicable. ...and you know what? I say this knowing that I fucking can't stand NIN music. As far as I'm concerned the only thing close to being any good they ever did was Closer, and that sold more on novelty and shock factor (and as a shagging song) than anything else.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I am sick and tired of articles like this, where the developing community has surrendered to Apple the rights to veto apps, for pretty much any reason, that they no doubt worked hard on, as well as giving Apple the ability to retroactively change their minds and kill apps on paying customer's phones. Why is is so acceptable for Apple to do this, when it clearly is not acceptable in the PC* world? Why do developers put up with this kind of draconian control by a third party over their own apps?
I for one can't stand it. To all developers of the iPhone, please stop developing for the iPhone. Hit Apple where it really hurts and develop for Android (not on the Market), the Freerunner, or pretty much any other platform instead, where you don't have to appease some entity that really needs you more than you need it. Don't just make an app that needs jailbreaking, as this still targets the iPhone and consequently still gives Apple more revenue and more power to control developers. If Apple insists on this kind of control, let them get their comeuppance.
*Note by "PC" I mean microcomputers, not Windows machines.
that's odd. I signed up a few days after 3.0 beta was released (when they would have had a huge influx of sign ups) and got approved the next day. perhaps you should give them a call and see what the hold up is
I guess Trent will have to take his application (and devoted money spending fans) elsewhere I guess...
Or he will write a song about Apple. Knowing Trent's material, Apple better hope he just moves on, because I doubt they will want to license it for a commercial...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Fuck any platform ...
... like an animal?
I wouldn't mind having the app on my gphone.
... and get off my lawn! seriously though, i'm all for folks like you trying to make a profitable business but frankly, you (and the rest of the industry) need a better business model. let me make analogy from your time period you're selling horses and but steve jobs is really henrey ford, and itunes? well, you can call that the assembly line. what you offer is obsolete.
should artists get paid for what they do? sure, but everyone wants to eliminate the middleman. if you cant find a good reason for people to buy CD's rather than download music (legally or otherwise) you need to stop being a middleman- produce something. the industrial revolution left a lot of people crying the same sob story you are.
sure you can argue that digital distribution is often illegal, but frankly the law is whatever people make it. the law in this case actually makes it harder on the artist. if the lawmakers werent at the beck and call of their corporate constituents the whole RIAA DRM crap would be ancient history, much like retail CD stores. now i know that last sentence may look kinda "conspiracy theory" but truthfully, someday the law will represent the will of the majority and when it does, artists will make music, put it on the tubes and i'll buy it directly from the artist and the RIAA, the record label, and you, will all be unemployed. so do yourself a favor, like i said before, go do something productive, dont be a middleman.
i wage a holy war against the apostrophe.
that no matter how hard Apple argues it, they're just as bad as Microsoft.
Shut up brain or I'll stab you with a Q-Tip. - Homer Simpson
iTunes sells Trent Reznors Music but wont distribute his App?
HUH?
Shouldnt Apple be giving the big "DUH" on this. What the fuck is Apple thinking?
I thought Apple was the "artist" friendly computer platform. You know that image they try to sell us on, using that hip "Mac guy"...
BEGIN SCENE
MAC GUY: "Hey PC, I'm a MAC, I dress like an artist, but really I'm just another fake image driven sock puppet for an evil corporation"
PC GUY: "Boy, I sure know how what it feels"
FADE TO WHITE
Apple.. Think What We Allow You To.
END SCENE.
Apple really has changed over the years. Its a very snobby platform for so called "artists". I find it histerical when I see college students thinking they MUST get a MAC if they will ever be an artist. Its just embarrasing. As if a platform makes you talented... If only it were that easy.
Image is everything, and Apple really needs to change direction and stop censoring song titles on itunes, and stop censoring applications. Simply have parenting mode settings in Itunes. Thats all you need. Let the parent decide what is right for their children. AND MORE IMPORTANTLY... Let us ADULTS choose what is right for us.
Oh and btw to you snobby college students that think you're artists because you just bought a Mac. You're wrong :) 95% of todays blockbuster films are made with windows pcs and linux pcs running various kinds of special fx software. Photography is done on both platforms but windows users out number mac users by a far.
Music? Sure... Protools for the Mac... of course! No wait... How about Nuendo for the PC? :) Far better.
Final Cut? ok you got us. :P
Hey will still have avid though... and the entire 3d animation industry.
How did it? Seems to be working wonders for the MAFIAA, they're making more money than ever.
Oh my. The Christians are pirating music?
Apple sells The Downward Spiral on iTunes!
Apple is starting to sound like Sony, where two (or more) competing ideologies threaten to drag the entire company down. Jobs needs to issue a set of objective, fair guidelines that apply across ALL content Apple sells on ALL of its storefronts. And yes, those guidelines need to come from His Steveness Himself, so that random lackeys in the App Store aren't left making judgment calls on the company's strategic direction.
This really is pretty outrageous; if you've seen the advance publicity for the NIN app, you'd probably agree that it was looking impressive as hell.
Trent Reznor is the artist with the most tech savvy attitude on the planet, at least as far as popular acts go. He currently has no record label contract and surely will never again have one, he has released music for free (as in beer), and has released music under the CC license, allowing fans to freely share and remix it. He has leaked his own material (the Broken Movie and the Closure DVD) to The Pirate Bay to overcome legal entanglements, because he wanted his music out there for people to hear. Like his music or not or not, you have to give him some credit for breaking out of the mainstream and proving the old record label system of doing things is not a necessity and can be overcome.
His attitudes resonate with a lot of us here on /. and I wouldn't be surprised if he is a member of this site.
Apple should reconsider... Trent has probably made the majority of his music on Apple computers, so he is a highly visible user of their products, not just "some musician". They should have embraced the marketing opportunity presented here.
I hope Trent shuns them for this... Apple's control freak attitude does not match with Trent's embrace of freedom, in both the monetary and the speech sense of the word. I say he is a trailblazer, the first big artist of the post RIAA/copyright dominated world. The first artist of the 21st century and the digital information age.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
There was a piece on G4TV a while back about a game parodying airport security policies. While you might think Apple objected to the concept itself, they rejected it instead for "inappropriate sexual content", without telling the developer what specifically they objected to, leaving him rather confused since the game wasn't sexually explicit at all. It turned out, after some months of guessing and resubmission and trying to contact people, that what had offended Apple was the inclusion of items like underwire bras (which are notorious for setting off metal detectors).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I have been a developer for over 30 years. My first application (we called them "programs" back then) was on the TRS-80 microcomputer sold by Radio Shack. In all this time I have seen a very disturbing trend towards closed operating systems and platforms. If the automotive industry operated the same way, you would be forced to only buy service and parts from "authorized" centers and distributors. This was long ago outlawed by state and federal regulations. If Microsoft were to only allow "approved" applications on their OS (computer or mobile), the federal government would be looking at a major case against their anti-competitive behaviour. Is there really a clause in the TOS for iPhone developers that they cannot say anything about a rejected application? Wow. I cannot understand how any company in todays market can get away with that. Well, lets see... Microsoft: open and free development for their platform, and will run on multiple hardware configurations. Google: open and free development for their platform, and will run on multiple hardware configurations. Apple: closed platform with final say of any application developed, and with a percentage of all applications being paid to Apple Corp. Can someone tell me again why I should by an iPhone? Can someone tell me why Apple has not been taken to court? Can someone explain to me the hype on why Apple is so much better than MS?
We've released 14 apps now to the AppStore and I could go on forever about our problems with it. And yes I'll remain anonymous, I fear google indexing and Apple's wrath.
Problem 1: They rejected our apps that had cartoon drawings of the possible future presidents in it, it was meant to be a silly app, yet was rejected because it "Defamed a public figure". We in no way depicted the potential presidents in any way.
Problem 2: Two of our apps, after about 1 week after submitting them for approval we received a email which said "It may take longer than expected to review your application". We determined this was because our application wasn't a "high priority" application. I think submitted apps have a process in which they first order them by apps which they think are of more benefit, or higher quality, or from big name publishers, and put them in a "order to review". These two apps took over 5 MONTHS to approve. So much for their one week turnaround. F**kers. One of our apps was time-sensitive, and well, after 5 months it was basically useless.
Problem 3: When the AppStore first launched, I made the mistake of saying "upload later" and invoking a bug with their Application Loader. Their application loader was too simple and would allow me to upload .apps and say they were uploaded properly, but not show them in the iTunesConnect website. I also got no errors or details about why not. I also was unable to get support from Apple. I went to two Apple Store's, emailed every iTunes and Developer support email I could find, and nothing. Two weeks went buy and we just figured it out, our version string wasn't properly formatted to their standards. They never got back to me on this issue at all. (not to all, do not "Upload later")
Problem 4: The "What's new" string on their web interface had a bug where you could only type in 64 characters even though the error said (too long, limit it to 4000 characters). Bug reported. Took them 4 weeks to fix this.
Problem 5: Early on there was NO information for developers. At least for small ones. We had NO information about how many sales, how the whole process worked, anything. If I would have known 1 week after our game was released it did so well, we would have started kicking ass on new games. Instead we have to wait a month+ to get any data.
There were a lot more things we ran into and Apple has kept updating things. But man... it was a very very rocky process. And very in the dark. I couldn't get support for shit. Every single beta update broke the app we were creating. Then even their updates all broke our app. Very limited backwards compatibility, and many undocumented new/changed features left us with a very bad taste in our mouth. Though they are finally up to date on most of the docs, it just took them 6 months or so to get there.
I understand Apple's position to a certain extent, after the whole baby-shaking incident, but
Does this mean "Twist and Shout" by the Beatles, with lyrics misheard as "We're shakin' a baby now", won't go on iTunes Store?