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This is the part I'm most worried about: As is clear from the screenshots, Qingwen doesn’t bombard you with words like “cock” and “penis” the moment you start

by timdorr 17y ago

This is the part I'm most worried about: As is clear from the screenshots, Qingwen doesn’t bombard you with words like “cock” and “penis” the moment you start it up. No, the Apple employee who took those screenshots specifically searched for those words. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the same thing as opening a website that contains swear words (like the page you’re reading, for instance) on the iPhone. If they don’t want Qingwen on the iPhone because it can show you “objectionable material”, then why allow Safari, Mail, YouTube and pretty much any other app, which can easily show you all sorts of even more “objectionable material”? I don't like the idea that reviewers are doing their best to try and make my apps fail approval. That comes across to me as a developer that Apple doesn't want me to succeed. And based on how they have been treating developers lately, that definitely seems to be the case. At the very least, this shows that the execs at Apple at least know about the problem. I know it's hard to miss, but I honestly thought they could have not heard about these issues by now. It's that bad. The utter silence that their corporate culture encourages is creating a horrible situation for them and for us. They need to realize that the traditional ways of secrecy and black boxing that normally works for other areas of their business is not going to work here.

tumult 17y ago
"We’ve reviewed your submission and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store at this time. The following criteria did not meet App Store guidelines: Application stopped responding after iPhone was thrown against concrete. Regards, iPhone Developer Program"
Zev 17y ago
I don't like the idea that reviewers are doing their best to try and make my apps fail approval. That comes across to me as a developer that Apple doesn't want me to succeed. Just to present an alternate viewpoint, where app reviewers manage to do good: That depends. If the reviewer was trying to make my app fail by crashing it — and managed to do so — I'd want to hear about it and have it fixed before I heard about it from the public.
phil 17y ago
Gruber is uncharacteristically imprecise in the paragraph you quote. If you look at the parental controls interface on your iPhone (Settings -> General -> Restrictions), it's obvious that Safari, Mail, YouTube, and so on can be individually restricted. There's also the more general option that allows restriction of third party apps based on rating. The goal of the parental controls is to secure the device against anything that goes beyond a given rated standard. That explains these decisions that seem silly, like requiring an adult rating because if you search for 'fuck' you get a definition, or because an app provides a webkit view of a totally innocuous wikipedia page. These are security holes that an enterprising 12 year old who wanted to circumvent the parental controls might be able to exploit. Yeah, you have to turn off Safari and YouTube and the rest to get a fully locked down phone, but you can do that. Doing so might be lousy parenting, but that's not at issue. The parental control feature is designed to allow a complete lockdown, that's what Apple claims it does, and the app review policy has to be strict, or it won't work.
- roc 17y ago
  That it's possible isn't the relevant bit. The fact that you can lock down all third party browsers based on rating, but have to explicitly lock down Safari separately exposes the absurdity and inconsistency of this policy. If Apple 'rated' Safari 17+ and youtube something like 14+, and the parental controls were applied universally, their policy wouldn't be nearly so bad.
  - phil 17y ago
    Yeah, you get more granular control over the built-in apps. Why would it make the policy better or more consistent if that ability were taken away?
    - roc 17y ago
      Because what you call 'granularity' is intentional inconsistency. Apple is making a fairly strict policy decision (open internet == 17+). But with separated parental controls for safari and youtube, they're are exempting themselves from the downsides of this policy (equivocating Safari with apps that actually do contain vulgar, suggestive and/or violent content). If they were at least willing to eat their own dog food, one could argue that Apple doesn't feel their policy is too strict. That they don't demonstrates that even they can see that the classification system doesn't quite work.

by timdorr 17y ago

tumult 17y ago

"We’ve reviewed your submission and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store at this time. The following criteria did not meet App Store guidelines: Application stopped responding after iPhone was thrown against concrete. Regards, iPhone Developer Program"

Zev 17y ago

I don't like the idea that reviewers are doing their best to try and make my apps fail approval. That comes across to me as a developer that Apple doesn't want me to succeed. Just to present an alternate viewpoint, where app reviewers manage to do good: That depends. If the reviewer was trying to make my app fail by crashing it — and managed to do so — I'd want to hear about it and have it fixed before I heard about it from the public.

phil 17y ago

Gruber is uncharacteristically imprecise in the paragraph you quote. If you look at the parental controls interface on your iPhone (Settings -> General -> Restrictions), it's obvious that Safari, Mail, YouTube, and so on can be individually restricted. There's also the more general option that allows restriction of third party apps based on rating. The goal of the parental controls is to secure the device against anything that goes beyond a given rated standard. That explains these decisions that seem silly, like requiring an adult rating because if you search for 'fuck' you get a definition, or because an app provides a webkit view of a totally innocuous wikipedia page. These are security holes that an enterprising 12 year old who wanted to circumvent the parental controls might be able to exploit. Yeah, you have to turn off Safari and YouTube and the rest to get a fully locked down phone, but you can do that. Doing so might be lousy parenting, but that's not at issue. The parental control feature is designed to allow a complete lockdown, that's what Apple claims it does, and the app review policy has to be strict, or it won't work.

roc 17y ago
That it's possible isn't the relevant bit. The fact that you can lock down all third party browsers based on rating, but have to explicitly lock down Safari separately exposes the absurdity and inconsistency of this policy. If Apple 'rated' Safari 17+ and youtube something like 14+, and the parental controls were applied universally, their policy wouldn't be nearly so bad.
- phil 17y ago
  Yeah, you get more granular control over the built-in apps. Why would it make the policy better or more consistent if that ability were taken away?
  - roc 17y ago
    Because what you call 'granularity' is intentional inconsistency. Apple is making a fairly strict policy decision (open internet == 17+). But with separated parental controls for safari and youtube, they're are exempting themselves from the downsides of this policy (equivocating Safari with apps that actually do contain vulgar, suggestive and/or violent content). If they were at least willing to eat their own dog food, one could argue that Apple doesn't feel their policy is too strict. That they don't demonstrates that even they can see that the classification system doesn't quite work.