iPhone review process squeezes out another one
Mike Royko once asked Carl Sandburg what he’d take with him if he had to deal with the iPhone app store review board. Sandburg answered “I would be sure… to take with me… a sufficient number of receptacles… to hold that… which Norman Mailer… calls shit.”
Apple’s iPhone review process is now so officially full of shit that it can’t accept any more. They’ve decided that dictionaries aren’t allowed to contain objectionable words—words that are included in the Oxford dictionary included on every Macintosh.
Matchstick makes Ninjawords, a fast and easy on-line dictionary, and created an iPhone version.
Matchstick did not hear back from Apple until May 30. Then, says Crosby: “We were rejected for objectionable content. They provided screenshots of the words ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ showing up in our dictionary’s search results. What’s interesting is that we spent a good deal of time making it so that you must type vulgar words in their entirety, and only then will we show you suggestions in the search results. For instance, if you type ‘fuc’, you will not see ‘fuck’ as a suggestion. This is in contrast to all other dictionaries we’re aware of on the App Store (including Dictionary.com’s application), which will show you ‘fuck’ in the search results for ‘fuc’, ‘motherfucker’ for ‘mother’, etc.
In other words, the App Store reviewer(s) explicitly searched for curse words they already knew, and found them. (Reminiscent of the reviewer who rejected the e-book reader Eucalyptus after searching for, and finding, the Gutenberg edition of The Kama Sutra.)
I have to agree with Gruber on this. “Every time I think I’ve seen the most outrageous App Store rejection, I’m soon proven wrong. I can’t imagine what it will take to top this one.” It’s as if there’s a contest going on for which reviewer can produce the most ridiculous rejection.
Yes, Apple, there is a fuck word. It exists as certainly as any other word in your own damn dictionary exists, and you know that they abound and give to your operating system its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no fuck word. It would be as dreary as if there were no iPhones.
As it turns out, I’ve just acquired a secret tape of an Apple reviewer talking with a developer•:
Apple: Do you have Olsen’s Standard Book of British Birds?
Developer: Yes, well, we do have that, as a matter of fact.
Apple: The expurgated version.
Developer: The expurgated version of Olsen’s Standard Book of British Birds?
Apple: The one without the gannet!
Developer: The one without the gannet? They’ve all got the gannet! It’s a standard British bird, the gannet, it’s in all the books!
Apple: Well, I don’t like them. They wet their nests.
Developer: All right! I’ll remove it! [tears out gannet page] Any other birds you don’t like?
Apple: I don’t like the robin.
Developer: The robin! Right! The robin! [tears out robin] There you are, any others you don’t like, any others?
Apple: The nuthatch?
Developer: Right! The nuthatch, the nuthatch, the nuthatch, here we are! [tear] There you are! No gannets, no robins, no nuthatches, there’s your book!
Apple: I can’t buy that! It’s torn!
17+ to read old books; 17+ to use a dictionary. Apple seems to be waging a war on literacy.
- The final rip off•: Monty Python (CD)
- Includes “The Argument”, which is a pretty good description of politics in some circles these days.
- Ninjawords
- “A really fast dictionary... fast like a ninja.”
- Ninjawords: iPhone Dictionary, Censored by Apple: John Gruber at Daring Fireball
- “It’s a terrific app—pretty much exactly what I’ve always wanted in an iPhone dictionary, and, yes, with both a better user experience and better dictionary content than the other low-cost dictionaries in the App Store. But Ninjawords for iPhone suffers one humiliating flaw: it omits all the words deemed ‘objectionable’ by Apple’s App Store reviewers, despite the fact that Ninjawords carries a 17+ rating.”
More iPhone
- Apple’s spinning mirror: exploiting children for dictatorships
- Apple has decided on “child porn” as the root password to disable privacy on their phones. But the system they’re using appears to be mostly worthless at detecting the exploitation of children, and very useful for detecting dissent from authoritarian governments.
- How does Apple’s supposed anti-conservative bias matter?
- If you think Apple has a bias against conservatives or Christians, you definitely don’t want Apple to build a tool its employees can use to help guess an iPhone’s password.
- Another reason to keep Flash off the iPhone
- I don’t know what Czerniak’s position is about Flash on the iPhone; I hope he’s against it, because if his opinions about Flash on Snow Leopard gain any traction, Flash will never be on any mobile device.
- Eucalyptus, revisited
- Eucalyptus is a great replacement for the paperback, not so great at using the fact that it’s a computer. But if you enjoy classics, I highly recommend it; it’s a beautiful e-reader for your iPhone/iPod Touch.
- Apple censors Kama Sutra
- Apple denied the beautiful e-reader Eucalyptus because it lets you search the web and find classics works of pornography… like the Kama Sutra. They’ve rejected the app because… you might use it to read Victorian porn.
Remember: Trump reassures crowd after assassination attempt fails. (read more…)