Apparently, when you submit your app to the App Store, they have people using it and looking for naughty words interspersed in the language, or looking for bare breasts (oh no…the horror), or they are judging the overall functionality of the App based some loose and unknown standards. You can probably guess that my personal opinion is that any and all apps should be allowed, unless they are violating specific laws, but I am not conceited enough to think that my standards should be applied to everyone else, so I agree that there needs to be a solution.

Personally, I think what Apple does well is write great software and build great products. I also think they suck at determining what is offensive and what isn’t, and quite frankly, I think everyone sucks at that. More to the point: putting themselves in this position only brings them bad publicity. Either they will piss off conservatives who think they are allowing too much horrible stuff that scars the children, or else they will piss off free speech advocates who believe that responsibility for judging decency falls on the individual and are paranoid about a 1984-esque future. In short, from the corporate perspective, there’s no way to win.

Rumors are that version 3.0 of the iPhone software addresses this issue to some degree. But, in the meantime, here’s how I think this problem should be solved.
(...)
Read the rest of A suggestion to get Apple out of the censorship business (1,196 words)

© gravitycollapse for Gravity Collapse, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: app store, business, censorship, iphone

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh