PheedYou, Inc.

This is not news, but Apple sure has their head on backwards about a few things.

We’ve had a substantial upgrade in Apple’s hands that adds a bunch of features and fixes a bunch of bugs, since December 22nd. Since then, two other Craigslist based applications have made it into the store — just fine by us. All of these applications, including ours, allow access to all the Craigslist forums including those that may have adult content.

After nothing but silence from Apple for over a month, someone was gracious enough to call us at the end of January and let us know what the delay was. You can see where this is going. We’re held up, apparently, because Apple has decided that even though our application passes the Terms of Service fine, it connects to content that may be objectionable. Just like, oh an RSS reader could, or any number of hundreds of apps in the store.

So we’ve been on permanent hold because of this. Apple suggested we suppress the offending Craigslist categories in order to get published. This sucks, but what choice do we have? We made the change immediately. But that was over a week ago, and still no dice and no answer from Apple.

None of this is at all surprising to me, I’ve known my whole life how incredibly hypocritical everything Apple is. But it’s a very unfortunate thing that they are so caught up in all things lawyerly about their store that they can’t see the forest for the trees.

The basic approve/reject notion that every app faces to get into the iTunes store is laughably absurd, doubly so given the wide range of app types and degrees of quality in the store. There’s a counterpoint to every Apple TOS already in the store.

Without a clear and concise guideline, ultimately, the iTunes store is going to have some very serious problems on its hand. Either from the developers involved, or from competition that gets it. Apple does not.