Ilia Draznin Online

If you’ve been fol­low­ing apple related news you’ve heard that they recently started com­ing really hard after any appli­ca­tions that could be con­sid­ered “sexy” or “sug­ges­tive” — whether its by virtue of hav­ing girls in biki­nis in their screen­shots, or sug­ges­tive text in the descrip­tion — and remov­ing them from the app store. You can read about it in more detail on this techcrunch and ars tech­nica posts.

I’m not going to argue about fair­ness to devel­op­ers who have invested time and money into, in many cases, per­fectly legit­i­mate apps, only to see them pulled down with­out any warn­ing despite being approved in the first place. I’m not going to dis­cuss the fact that there seems to be no clear guide­lines or rules as to what con­sti­tutes an “offend­ing” app, mean­ing that these can change at any moment to accom­mo­date apple’s every whim. I’m not even going to men­tion that not a few months ago apple intro­duced the 17+ rat­ing which is used to pre­vent the pur­chase of “adult” apps by kids, and which could be eas­ily used to also fil­ter out those apps from even show­ing up on the store pages unless age was ver­i­fied. (Why Apple would not do that in the first place is beyond me, you’d think they have ama­teurs work­ing there.)

I sim­ply want to point out that a com­pany (and more impor­tantly, the man in charge of that com­pany) that once prided itself on stand­ing up to “the man” (Microsoft), is now doing things that are far worse than what “the man” ever did. Can you imag­ine for a sec­ond what would hap­pen if MS started block­ing soft­ware and appli­ca­tions from Windows because they were “from com­peti­tor”, or had “tit­il­lat­ing images”, or “dupli­cated exist­ing func­tion­al­ity”? Why, why are there peo­ple defend­ing Apple?!?! The entire European Union got up in arms because MS bun­dled IE with Windows, yet we are allow­ing Apple absolute con­trol over a prod­uct that WE bought and sup­pos­edly own. The iPhone (and in the future prob­a­bly the iPad) is fast becom­ing the sec­ond “PC” for many. With one lit­tle dif­fer­ence of course — when you buy a PC desk­top or lap­top (even one with Mac OS) on it, you’re in con­trol. You decide what soft­ware to install, and how to use it. With the iPhone you don’t — you can only do what Apple deems appro­pri­ate. I don’t know about you, but that scares me.

So what’s next? Will Apple be block­ing Stanza and Classics when iPad comes out because they dupli­cate func­tion­al­ity of Apple’s book­store? Will it pull down Evernote from the app store if it decides to extend the native note app to use the cloud. And what about Safari? Can’t help but bring up the fact that MS was forced to include a browser bal­lot screen and the European copy of win­dows (while never actu­ally block­ing any­one from installing other browsers), yet Apple gets away with not allow­ing any “browser” appli­ca­tions in the app store.

Of course the worst part of it all is that they get away with all of that — so many peo­ple have been blinded by the shiny iphone that as far as the aver­age user is con­cerned it’s all per­fectly fine. Only the blog­gers and the techies actu­ally speak out against this, and even then the opin­ions are split 50/50. All I can say is Double U. Tee. Eff!