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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."
"Folks who want cancer can buy an iPhone"
"Non-smokers can purchase an Android." -- Steve Jobs
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
The problem is not that Apple is making moral decisions about which applications to allow in the App Store. The problem is their ever-changing, wildly inconsistent approval guidelines. This application might get approved while other seemingly identical applications might get rejected. That's the real problem: developers simply have no way to know which way the App Store approval process wind is blowing on a given day. I wouldn't have such a bone to pick with Apple if they just picked a position and stuck with it consistently.
-William Brendel
And just to clarify, I believe people should be allowed to run third-party applications on their iPhone without having to go through the App Store (or jailbreaking). I'm just saying that the inconsistency is what really bugs me. If they want to sell a G-rated phone, that's fine with me. Advertise it as such and enforce that policy consistently, but don't blame me when I take my business elsewhere. As a matter of fact, I'm switching to an Android-based phone on Thursday.
-William Brendel
Apple has been taking the "moral high ground" by banning apps with jiggly women, excessive violence, and political satire. They have said that they want to be a family safe zone, and have hurt many developers to become that.
Also, developers are particularly upset about the inconsistent interpretation of Apple's ever-shifting rules. For a while, slightly dirty apps were OK so long as they were wearing underwear, then they were mass banned. Apps have been banned for "duplicating functionality" of Apple applications that hadn't been released or announced at the time of the rejection. They recently banned 3rd party code interpretation tools, due to their years-long war with flash, which has thrown into doubt the state of thousands of popular applications.
At this point, basically everyone except Steve Jobs would like to see Apple stop babysitting their users and actually utilize the ratings system that they implemented. Short of that, they need a degree of consistency that they are nowhere near achieving.
The ______ Agenda
Come one... how many people sit in a circle and pass around a cigarette. You all know this is a pot smoking game. They might have well specified the items as 'joint, fatty and bong'.
"It is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees." - Albert Camus
The point (on here) is that Steve was really proud / pretentious / narcissistic that they do exactly that. He takes a swipe at others for being lowbrow.
Mr. Jobs has made an entire career on pretension. There's a reason that Apple evokes so much rabid zealotry from the otherwise computer-agnostic arty types. Just look at the way he boldly announces products' limitations and disabilities as strokes of design genius (and then later, even more astoundingly, announces re-enabling basic functionality as 'groundbreaking new features' - witness the iPhone's recent addition of multi-tasking, and the "you can't fit a netbook in your pocket" campaign with the release of the iPhone and iPod Touch, then the backflip to "bigger is better" with the release of the iPad). In the art world, you can go an awfully long way on "you're just not insightful enough to understand the vision", and these schmucks don't realise that it doesn't carry over into technical areas.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
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.
The ______ Agenda