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Apple Rejects Drone Strike App
eldavojohn writes "Developer Josh Begley, a student at Clay Shirky's NYU Media Lab, created an application called Drones+ that allows users to track U.S. drone strikes on a map of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Far from innovative, the app in question merely relays and positions strikes as available from the U.K.'s Bureau of Investigative Journalism. First Apple rejected the application claiming it was 'not useful or entertaining enough,' then it was rejected for hiding a corporate logo. And the latest reason for objection is that Begley's content is 'objectionable and crude' and 'that many audiences would find [it] objectionable." Begley's at a loss for how to change information on a map. He's not showing images of the drone strikes nor even graphically describing the strikes. From the end of the article, 'The basic idea was to see if he could get App Store denizens a bit more interested in the U.S.' secretive, robotic wars, with information on those wars popping up on their phones the same way an Instagram comment or retweet might. Instead, Begley's thinking about whether he'd have a better shot making the same point in the Android Market.'"
with a ten foot pole.
Apple is, and should be, free to prohibit any content they want on their store. It's their store, we shouldn't force them to add stuff they don't want.
The problem here is the locked down devices. You have no other way of installing things on an iPhone. Which is precisely why I don't own one.
If the 'app' is rated as objectionable and 'crude'', what does that make the actions themselves? Are we all so content as a society to hide our heads under our pillows, all the while chanting 'freedom in the USA!'?
I think the guy had a valid point -- If the app exists or doesn't exist, it doesn't change the data points that are being created (Monthly/Weekly/Daily?) nor the map itself.
Correlation is not causation - Apple should know this.
A Drone Strike app which can't initiate strikes is like an email client which can't send email.
Apple deserves our thanks for keeping unfinished apps out of the App Store.
Put it on a website!
Why does everything have to be an app these days? If you just want to display information, isn't that exactly what the Web was designed for? Why turn it into something that only a minority of your potential audience can make use of?
We already went through this whole proprietary wrappers nonsense back in the early days of the Internet. I thought we learned our lesson. Apparently not.
End rant.
Oh yeah, and get off my lawn!
The big new "magical" feature in the upcoming iPhone 5 is the ability to track drone strikes.
-Lod
In other words, this guy has discovered first hand what happens when content gets censored on grounds of being "objectionable."
It doesn't matter what the subject is, SOMEONE will find it objectionable.
Evolution? Creationists.
Fluffy Kittens? PETA.
Babies? Malthists
Picking flowers? Botanical conservationists.
Vaccination? Antivac-ers.
Birth control? Catholics
Lipstick? Orthodox muslims
Etc.
If the metric for rejection was "objectionable", then the only way for apple's store to remain open is if it has nothing to sell.
Rather, Apple has taken the shister path, and has conflated "unpopular" with "objectionable", since the real application of that word would exclude all products.
As such, anything sociologically or politically unpopular, regardless of factual content, is banned.
"Begley's thinking about whether he'd have a better shot making the same point in the Android Market.'"
He'd be allowed to try. Considering there are considerably more Android users than iThing users, he'd also have a bigger impact if his app was popular.
Freedom: it's not really so bad, despite what Apple would have you believe.
-Lod
to question or challenge US authority. He should be grateful his house isn't on the map.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Is anyone keeping track of the apps that Apple has forbidden from the appstore?
I used to be reduced to pointing at the bouncy-boobs type apps (shake the phone and watch a girl's tits bounce) until recently when a friend had to deal with an abusive spouse.
I went looking for an iphone app that records video and audio with the screen turned off - she wanted evidence of him being violent - but as far as I could tell apple doesn't permit such apps. There are some available in the jail-break version of the appstore, but jail-breaking is not an option for the typical battered woman.
Then we went looking for an app that would automatically forward all received text messages to an email address, because the guy likes to send threatening texts and it would be helpful to automatically archive them. Again no go - apparently you have to cut-n-paste them one at a time or rely on a significant level of technical expertise to manually extract them from the icloud(?) backups of the phone.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The problem is of course the current namby-pamby nanny-state commie liberal president you've got, who insists on signing every drone death warrant personally.
A real red blooded conservative president, who upheld the US citizen's right to bear arms properly, would allow users of the app to kill foreigners with drones as easily as they are currently allowed to kill fellow Americans with handguns.
There are "many audiences" that would find the content on the Adult Swim app "objectionable and crude", too, but Apple doesn't have a problem with that.
Here's the reason walled gardens are bad for you: Because you don't get to choose how to use your own device.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm an iOS developer, and keep in mind when you read this that there is an entire industry of developers whose business plan is to submit pointless novelty/spam games and apps to the App Store as fast as humanly possible. Because of this, Apple has made it so you can't submit any app that simply aggregates web content or has limited functionality, and I think it's good for the App Store to impose this. On the iOS forums I follow, people get rejected constantly for simple aggregator apps like this.
So being a bit of a collector of these spam apps and having seen a lot of them, I don't really blame Apple for not being able to tell the different between those spam apps and this -- which maybe deserves a bit more consideration than the average spam aggregator app. I blame the app spammers who have wrecked the system, not Apple.
And anyway, geez, just make the project a webpage and twitter account and it has the same effect and you aren't limited to iOS. Oh, but then it's not as "cool" because it's not an iPhone app!
I'm not surprised that Apple has rejected an App that has the purpose of getting people interested in the author's own political agenda.
There's a Mitt Romney app (and other politicians), apps for newspapers and TV news channels galore, and lots and lots of other apps that are about one political agenda or other. How is this one different?
This one is made by some filthy peasant... a mere citizen. The others were submitted by corporate partners, job creators, you know, the real American people.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan