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Apple’s App Store Director Sells His Own Fart Apps
- mkramlich 16y agoThis story has strangely made me think of the "eat your own dogfood" principle.
- mxavier 16y agoI really could have gone the whole day without seeing a cartoon panda's anus.
- mkramlich 16y agoThankfully Apple's curated walled garden approach to ensuring quality (keeping out Flash, Python, Java, Ruby, anything "obscene", competitive functionality, etc.) still managed to allow cartoon panda anus farting!
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- brudgers 16y agoAnd if you need a cartoon picture of a panda's anus...well there's an app for that too.
- msbarnett 16y agoI'm really struggling to be offended that this guy is making money on a side business selling things that people buy, even if I wouldn't personally buy them and think they are kind of puerile.
- chc 16y agoHow about the fact that the same guy institutes policies that ban huge swaths of apps (including anything not written in Objective-C)?
- msbarnett 16y agoUnless there's some kind of assertion here that Python-based fart apps would eat his lunch if only he would allow them, I'm not seeing the problem.
- chc 16y agoI don't know if you're pretending or if you really missed the point, but it isn't that Python would kill his apps. It's that his apps get special protection. Fart apps are essentially the poster child for "crapware" in the App Store. Anytime someone wants to criticize the App Store, they will probably point to apps like the ones he's making. But while Apple constantly expands its list of unacceptable things (the programming language ban is merely the most ridiculous, not the only the thing on the list), fart apps remain the one genre that seems untouchable. It's a messed up state of affairs.
- msbarnett 16y agoIt's a pretty far leap (down right silly, really) from "man sells some silly apps prior to getting job curating App Store at Apple" to "fart apps would be banned if only he weren't giving them special protection!" There is literally no evidence to support the latter interpretation.
- chc 16y agoNo, but it's an example of horribly screwed up priorities either way.
- astrange 16y agoDo people complain that they can't let their kids look at the App Store because of fart apps?
- chc 16y agoDo people complain that they can't let their kids look at the App Store because of Scheme apps or apps that superimpose the time over an image? Don't see the relevance. Even for objectionable apps, you can just block them.
- jcl 16y agoI guess the article's author wants us to contrast the puerility of the director's apps with the fact that it's his job to decide which apps get rejected on the basis of content. But maybe this is exactly the kind of person one would want in charge of the decision-making process? ...someone who knows that if the content bar is set too high, he would never have gotten into the app store -- and his current job.
- lallysingh 16y agoSadly no; I suspect that if he's lowering the bar here, he has to unreasonably raise it somewhere else to make him look like he's doing his job. Considering the infamous reasons apps have been rejected, I'm not sure I'm wrong on this.
- naner 16y agoHe was embarrassed enough to try and purge all history connecting him to his company's apps. I think that says enough. I'm not offended, but I think that it is pretty low class. That being said, I don't know if this character assassination by Wired is warranted. It is just some idiot selling fart apps. Not exactly newsworthy.
- eitland 16y ago>Not exactly newsworthy. Except that he is now on the othe side of the table.
- mikeryan 16y agoBTW, in case you don't make it the last page - it looks like most of these apps were already in the Apple review process before he got hired.
- jackolas 16y agoI don't know who that makes look worse, apple for hiring a fart developer or the fart developer for you know making ifart apps.
- ugh 16y agoI’m not really sure why developers of fart apps are automatically off limits or embarrassing.
- megablast 16y agoReally? Is this the best Apple could do?
- metachor 16y agoIf Apple blocked fart apps of third-party developers for the sake of... I don't know what, quality or decency, then people would complain Apple are being censors. Regarding Shoemaker, maybe Apple hired him to direct the App Store because he can run a massive online marketplace, and not because he's a talented or creative app developer.
- megablast 16y agoYes. This is true, but this is now what people are asking. I didn't mean to imply that he wasn't a skilled person in many ways.
- ugh 16y ago(A little semantic aside: Apple cannot censor. Governments can, companies cannot. If we broaden the definition of censorship to include companies Apple already censors. Their system is a picture perfect example of censorship, you could use it as an example to explain censorship to school kids – but so are newspapers. This all doesn’t really matter because the word censorship doesn’t have some sort of magic properties. Something can be just as despicable as some activities described by the word censorship even if the usual definition of censorship doesn’t include it. Something can also be a perfectly reasonable activity even if the usual definition of censorship does include it.)
- GBond 16y agoDoes a Panda's anus warrant a "Mature 17+" label? Or is that only for animated boobs?
- danh 16y agoI would hesitate to call it "mature".
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- rryyan 16y agoAs an aside: I thought this quote from an Apple spokesperson was interesting, given Microsoft's plan to encourage employees to develop Windows Phone apps "in their spare time" [1]: "Apple’s policy allows for employees to have apps on the App Store if they’re developed and published prior to their start at Apple." [1] http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/microsoft-wants-employees-to-code-windows-phone-7-apps-in-their/ http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/microsoft-wants-employees...
- wallflower 16y agoWhen I was at WWDC, there was an Apple engineer named Eliza Block. She and her partner gave a really good (best of WWDC) presentation on Designing Scroll View UIs. Her name seemed familiar so I googled it and it turns out she was the author of a very successful iPhone app. Apparently, she probably got recruited or asked to become an iPhone Applications Engineer at Apple. A testament to her software development ability (the googled articles said she was a graduate Philosophy student).
- neild 16y agoShe's the author of my favorite iPhone crossword app. Good on her for getting hired by Apple, although I'm a bit sad if that's the reason there's no iPad version of 2 Across.
- arn 16y agoEliza was actually the first App Store success story, inspiring many to follow: http://www.macrumors.com/2008/08/01/iphone-app-store-numbers-reveal-large-revenue-opportunities/ http://www.macrumors.com/2008/08/01/iphone-app-store-numbers...
- mdonahoe 16y agoAnd now they drag him through the mud: http://valleywag.gawker.com/5615971/apples-freedom-from-porn-enforcer-drawn-to-porn-stars-and-escorts-on-twitter http://valleywag.gawker.com/5615971/apples-freedom-from-porn... the danger of using auto-follow services on twitter.
- NonIdentifiable 16y agoExcept they pretty much disproved the auto-follow stuff ...
- jonhendry 16y agoUh, right. I'm sure he intentionally followed an escort service in Hyderabad. (Or, more likely, a spammy website that claims to be a Hyderabad escort service.) And one in New Delhi. I might believe it if the escorts were from San Francisco, LA, Vegas. But India? It seems unlikely that he's a frequent visitor to India in a context where he'd want to link escort services in two cities there. Please. Web savvy fail. Most likely somebody with a 'circle jerk' ring of bogus escort sites spammed twitter accounts and hit this guy's, and he didn't pay attention to it.
- Tichy 16y agoHow did they disprove it? By showing that a lot of these follows happened close to each other? That seems perfectly explainable if one escort agency decided to start spamming and let their bots loose promoting several of their models at the same time.
- mtholking 16y agoAs an iPhone developer, I don't want to compete with a developer that also happens to oversee the entire App Store approval process.
- chc 16y agoYou already do. It's called Apple. If they want, they can just ban your app and make their own version. You just have to trust that they won't.
- mtholking 16y agoApple gets 30% of all revenue developers generate, so they aren't really competition. Name one app that has existed on the App Store that Apple banned because they released their own version of it, and charged for it. I trust that they want me to succeed to they get 30% of a much larger number.
- chc 16y agoThere haven't been any yet that I can recall, but they have cannibalized popular third-party Mac apps before — try searching for Watson or Konfabulator. And their rejection of that picture frame app seemed to be on the basis that it trod on ground they wanted to cover themselves.
- megablast 16y agoThe banned an app called facetime, just for the name. They banned rss viewers for a while. They have not allowed in alternate browsers. What difference does it make if they charge for it or not?
- refulgentis 16y agoErm, there's tons of alternate browsers. There just can't be one with it's own JavaScript parser baked in because of the ban on interpreters, and even then they said you can ask to include one in the latest round of SDK revisions.
- blizkreeg 16y agoThe title made my day.
- Hexstream 16y ago"Still, it comes off as hypocritical that a director of the App Store sells apps that some might call inappropriate, said Ben Kahle, developer of Me So Holy, a satiric religious app that Apple rejected in mid-2009 for containing “objectionable material.” Kahle said after he re-submitted the app to the store, an Apple employee called him and said Me So Holy would “never” be approved." Obvious stuff. Never underestimate the power of well-established special interest groups. There's no powerful interest group against farts so of course it's not considered "objectionable", unlike religion.