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Apple Just Says Yes To iPhone Smoking Game
ZosX sends along a puff piece from Wired's Brian X. Chen: "Apple on Monday approved Puff Puff Pass, a $2 game whose objective is to pass a cigarette or pipe around and puff it as many times as you can within a set duration. So much for taking the high road, Apple. The game allows you to choose between smoking a cigarette, a cigar, and a pipe. Then you select the number of people you'd like to light up with (up to five), the amount of time, and a place to smoke (outdoors or indoors). And you're ready to get right on puffing."
Nah. The Apple apologists will apologize, the Apple haters will hate, and I'll wonder why in the hell this worthless story is on Slashdot in the first place.
Ah– kdawson. That explains it.
If you had a game that required you to bludgeon a person with a brick in order to play the game, then your analogy would make sense. This doesn't encourage smoking, you cannot play unless you have a cigarette "joint", cigar "blunt", or pipe "bowl". I mean it's pretty obvious the game is about smoking weed, and not tobacco, because who really passes a cigarette around. A cigar would get nasty fast, and a pipe isn't much better because you hold the smoke in your mouth. If you inhale pipe smoke you will throw up.
This is a weed game, it does not encourage smoking, you must smoke to play. You would not buy it if you didn't already have the weed, or tobacco ... I guess?
Of course you don't care. You won't until it personally affects you.
I didn't care much either, until Apple forced the Stanza app to remove its functionality to load books through the USB cable. Which I liked, instead of using the wireless transfer or internet download workarounds
Wait till the Apple restrictions bites you or your favourite app in the ass.
iGanja and iCrack are next on the iApprove list.
Apple just banned wifi-searching and network tools apps from the app store.
They approved a large number of non-nude adult apps before turning around and banning them later.
They ban political parody apps, including one where you could have Obama jumping on a trampoline to collect votes.
They ban apps that "duplicate functionality" of stuff that Apple hasn't announced or released, and that the app creator has no way of knowing exists.
They just banned 3rd party code translation frameworks. This was intended to ban Flash-based applications. It accidentally also bans all unity-based games, as well as many, many others. Apple appears to be giving those a wink and a nudge at the moment, but who knows.
Apple has simply not responded to applications submitted to the app store, keeping them in limbo indefinitely with no comment as to why.
The app store approval process itself is prone to random and embarassing gaffes, including denying a particular Tweetie update because a trending topic that day happened to be a dirty one. They denied a bookreading frontend that hooked up to Project Gutenberg because Project Gutenberg (amongst hundreds of thousands of books) includes the Kama Sutra. They banned a Nine Inch Nails app because it linked to an adult Nine Inch Nails song in iTunes.
And unlike console (or other sane) development, there is no way to contact Apple ahead of time and get concept approval or a list of what might be wrong. You have to go ahead and invest the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in development, then pray that Apple doesn't decide to reject the app or leave it hanging in limbo.
They banned wifi-stumbling apps. They banned an LCD buyer's guide. They banned Leisure Suit Larry. They banned Seikai-Camera, a GPS photography tool. They banned a Pulitzer prize-winning satyrist, then caved to public pressure and approved him but remain continue banning everyone else. They banned 3G video streaming, which wasn't against their rules at all. They banned the South Park app, for having exactly the sort of content that they give valuable promotional space in iTunes to South Park episodes. They banned a British newspaper app for the sort of nudity you find in British newspapers.
The last few games I've worked on have had budgets of 10 - 20 million dollars. Can you imagine how terrible it would be if we developed all of that for the iPhone, only to be told by Apple on the whims of change that zombies are no longer allowed in the app store? Or having the iPhone be a lynchpin of a radical new form of telephony, only to be told that AT&T doesn't like it? This is not consistent enforcement of unpopular rules. This is random enforcement of random and ever-changing rules.
Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, and all of the other platform holders that I've worked with have had their approval rules. But they've also been responsive to developer queries. They work closely with developers before, during, and after development to make sure nobody is wasting their time or money. Their rules are locked months before final approval, so that you're not aiming for a moving target. Apple seems to want that level of financial reward for controlling the gateway, but none of the responsibility that a gateway holder needs to take towards their developers.
They need to either open up completely and trust their users to know what an "Adult" rating is, or they need to take some of that 30% they're absconding with and invest it into much better developer feedback systems.
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