Nik Rawlinson
But will Apple learn a moral lesson over its wobbly approval process?
There’s a lot of chatter right now about Apple’s decision to delete 5000-odd applications from iTunes App Store. Its grounds? Taste and decency.
Talk about horses, doors and bolting.
The apps in question largely revolved around body parts and minimal clothing and Apple was, it said, acting after it ‘came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content was too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see’. So said marketing supremo Phil Schiller.
Fair enough, but aren’t there checks in place already to make sure there isn’t any ‘objectionable’ content. For starters, these women and parents could simply not have downloaded the offending apps. They don’t exactly leap out at you from the Store’s front page, so you have to go looking for them. Then there’s the rating system introduced with iPhone OS 3.0, which was designed to reduce the likelihood of Wobble iBoobs and Sexy Scratch Off (I kid you not) offending impressionable eyes.
And then there is the approval process.
If it took complaints from women and parents for the approval team to realise that wobbling body parts could be seen as objectionable, then clearly something was amiss in the training. That makes Apple look less like a moral guardian, and more like a company that took its proverbial eye off the clich?©d ball.
So where do we go from here?
It’s a well-documented fact that Apple’s retrospective removal of apps to which it takes offence and the unclear guidelines for what is and isn’t acceptable have scared off some platform big-hitters. After its problems in posting an update to Airfoil Touch, Rogue Amoeba (Radioshift, Audio Hijack Pro) declared ‘the potential remains for months of effort to be wasted as an app sits in limbo, or is never even released… we don’t believe it makes good business sense for us to commit much in the way of resources to the iPhone. We’ll make sure our existing applications continue to function, of course, but that’s all we have planned for now.’
Competition in the smartphone arena is more fierce than ever, with the handsets set to outsell traditional computers within the next couple of years. If Apple wants to maintain its lead, it should concentrate less on chasing the likes of HTC and Nokia and more on setting clear and easily understood guidelines by which it can itself abide.
Right now the company finds itself scrutinised by both developers and consumers. Ironic, isn’t it, when that’s largely because some parties on both sides see Apple’s own scrutineering as flawed.
