August 7, 2009 by Jenny Sanderson
The turbulent life of whoever decides what does and doesn’t get onto the App Store is continuing apace, with news that their approvals policy has once again caused outrage amongst developers and the media, though not for the usual reasons…
In the past the App Store has come under fire for having too liberal a policy on App Store inclusions, those who follow this blog will remember the controversy over the ‘Card Counting App,’ that allowed you to cheat at blackjack, the ‘Hottest Girls App,’ that got in trouble for showing iPod users nude pics of women, and of course the hugely tasteless ‘Baby Shaker App.’ This time however the controversy is quite different.
‘Ninjawords,’ a dictionary application, was originally turned down for inclusion because it contained rude and objectionable content – well, technically definitions of rude and objectionable words. The developers duly removed the rude words but the App Store still classified their programme as only viewable by over 17s.
Apple were of course technically correct, dictionaries do contain bad language, though to ‘protect the public’ from something that’s freely available in every middle school library in the country seems a little strange. Chalk it up as another crazy App Store decision.
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