So, I’m sitting with Mike Pegg here at our Google DevFest venue in Buenos Aires (by the way, in the Puerto Madero campus of the Universidad Católica Argentina, which is a lovely place). This guy who’s attending the event walks up to us and says in a pained voice “Damn, Apple just called and told me they’d taken my app down. This is awful!”

Mike and I were a little taken aback; the guy just stood there, so eventually I asked “Uh, what did it do?”

“Oh, just a little AR thing. They took months and months to approve it and now they’ve taken it down!”

“Yeah, but what did it do?”

“Oh, it overlaid this realistic-looking rifle on the on the camera view, you could point it at people and shoot them.”

And with that he walked off. Mike and stared blank-faced at each other; Mike asked “He’s making that up, right?” I said there was no way to tell, but it sounded perfectly believable. Then I was laughing.

While I’m not a notable fan of the App Store’s policies, my problem is with prior approval; I’m totally OK with ripping things down when you don’t want ’em in your store. (Particularly if your store isn’t the exclusive sales channel, but that’s another issue.) I don’t really have an opinion whether Apple made the right call but hey, it’s their call.

Why was I laughing? Sympathy for whoever had to make the call; I can just imagine the lengthy email threads and internal wrangling that I bet goes on around this sort of thing.



Contributions

Comment feed for ongoing:Comments feed

From: Zeb DeOs (Nov 02 2010, at 20:11)

I agree that if it's your store you get to decide what to sell. Problem with Apple is they don't allow other stores, or independent publishers, on to their iOS devices. I wonder if that will be where they try to go into the future with the new Mac App Store. I know it isn't that way now, but what stops them from doing that for Mac OS versions?

[link]

From: Santiago (Nov 09 2010, at 03:06)

Tim, it's "Puerto Madero". With a trailing O.

Thanks for your visit to Argentina!

[link]

author · Dad
colophon · rights
picture of the day
November 02, 2010
· Business (126 fragments)
· · Mobile (20 more)

By .

The opinions expressed here
are my own, and no other party
necessarily agrees with them.

A full disclosure of my
professional interests is
on the author page.

I’m on Mastodon!