Unexpected iPhone apps rejections — Part 1

There has been a lot writ­ten about the Apple appli­ca­tion store process and while it appears more trans­parency could be on the way, lit­tle is know about the rejec­tion process. A lit­tle known fact is that inter­nal devel­op­ers at Apple have to pass the same type of rig­or­ous review as any­one else before their appli­ca­tion makes it into an iPhone.

Fol­low­ing is the first part of a list of the first 18 appli­ca­tions to have been ini­tially banned on the iPhone, along with rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion related to the rejec­tions. Those bans were even­tu­ally reversed, allow­ing appli­ca­tions to make their ways into the phone. In this first part, we will look at the big 4: Phone, Mail, Safari, and the iPod (the next entry will exam­ine the other ones).

Phone

It comes as a lit­tle known fact that the approval process almost killed phone func­tion­al­ity on the iPhone. The orig­i­nal devel­op­ers had a hard time get­ting the appli­ca­tion approved, as can be seen in this ini­tial rejec­tion letter:

Thank you for sub­mit­ting Phone to the iPhone approval process. We’ve reviewed your appli­ca­tion and deter­mined that we can­not include this ver­sion of your iPhone appli­ca­tion at this time because it con­tains objec­tion­able con­tent which is in vio­la­tion of Sec­tion 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agree­ment which states:

“Appli­ca­tions must not con­tain any obscene, porno­graphic, offen­sive or defam­a­tory con­tent or mate­ri­als of any kind (text, graph­ics, images, pho­tographs, etc.), or other con­tent or mate­ri­als that in Apple’s rea­son­able judge­ment may be found objec­tion­able by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

We have heard that so called “phones” can be used in a num­ber of ways includ­ing com­mu­ni­cat­ing secrets related to the inter­nal work­ing of large Cupertino-based com­pa­nies located on Infi­nite Loop to peo­ple out­side said com­pa­nies. Please make the nec­es­sary changes to the appli­ca­tion as soon as pos­si­ble, and resub­mit your binary to us. Thank you

After many emails going back and forth, it was agreed that any men­tion of words picked from a still secret list of prod­uct names and com­pa­nies names would result in the phone imme­di­ately los­ing sig­nal and the call being dropped. A secret mes­sage would also be sent to an undis­closed loca­tion iden­ti­fy­ing the peo­ple involved with that call.

Mail

The sec­ond rejected iPhone appli­ca­tion was a lit­tle more under­stand­able. After all, Apple is known for its sim­plic­ity and the fact that the com­pany tends to remove redun­dant func­tion­al­ity from its devices in order to ensure the best user expe­ri­ence. While lit­tle vis­i­bil­ity is given into the deci­sion process around defin­ing what what gets approved or banned, TNL.net got hold of inter­nal tran­scripts of the dis­cus­sion that led to even­tual ban of the Mail appli­ca­tion. Here is the abridged ver­sion, as we wanted to pro­tect sen­si­tive information:

Reviewer 1: Hey, we’ve got this mail appli­ca­tion here, looks like it does (shuf­fle of paper­work to review what infor­ma­tion has been sub­mit­ted)… uh e-mail.

Reviewer 2: I’ve heard of that. I under­stand you can con­tact your friends with that and write them notes.

Reviewer 1: Why would you want to do some­thing like that.

Reviewer 2: (pauses) uh.. well, let’s say you wanted to tell a friend a joke

Reviewer 1: You mean like call them on the phone and tell them a joke, looks like it’s repro­duc­ing exist­ing functionality.

Reviewer 2: Hmmmm. Maybe but you could also use it to com­mu­ni­cate infor­ma­tion to a lot of peo­ple in one shot. For exam­ple, if you were a Niger­ian prince look­ing for some­one to help you move money out of your country…

Reviewer 1: Why wouldn’t you use a phone for that?

Reviewer 2: Well, long dis­tance costs, for starter. And then, it would take a lot of time to call peo­ple individually.

Reviewer 1: (looks up list of coun­tries in which the iPhone is slated to be sold) Well, Nige­ria doesn’t appear on the list so let’s reject this.

Reviewer 2: Oh, I didn’t real­ize Nige­ria was not on the list. Def­i­nitely reject then.

After sev­eral phone con­ver­sa­tions, three inter­na­tional meet­ings and sign-off from half of the com­pany, it was agreed that mail should be allowed because pic­tures of lol­cat just don’t seem as good when recounted over the telephone.

Safari

At this point in the iPhone’s devel­op­ment cycle, get­ting appli­ca­tions approved was still get­ting tough but Safari, slated to be the third icon on the device also had its own uphill bat­tle. The sub­mis­sion of this appli­ca­tion came to estab­lished the short-lived record of being denied in under 10 min­utes. The denial did not even come by email but was deliv­ered in the form of a mes­sage on the developer’s voice mail system:

Reviewer’s Man­ager: Thank you for sub­mit­ting Safari, your “web browser” for inclu­sion on the iPhone. After research­ing this web thing via our macs, we have come to the con­clu­sion that it is too obscene, offen­sive, rid­dled with porno­graphic and other use­less mate­r­ial to war­rant use by iPod and iPhone users. Fur­ther­more, we have dis­cov­ered that some of the con­tent seen there is repli­cated con­tent that can be bought in the iTunes store and stored on iPods. Should you make changes to the appli­ca­tion that would ensure this inter­net thing is sec­tioned off, we would be happy to re-review after you sub­mit a binary to us.

In this par­tic­u­lar case, Steve Jobs him­self inter­vened, pro­vid­ing a note in an inter­nal memo (and reit­er­at­ing the point when the device was released):

We have been try­ing to come up with a solu­tion to expand the capa­bil­i­ties of the iPhone so devel­op­ers can write great apps for it, but keep the iPhone secure. And we’ve come up with a very. Sweet. Solu­tion. Let me tell you about it. An inno­v­a­tive new way to cre­ate appli­ca­tions for mobile devices… it’s all based on the fact that we have the full Safari engine in the iPhone.  You can write amaz­ing Web 2.0 and AJAX apps that look and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone, and these apps can inte­grate per­fectly with iPhone ser­vices. They can make a call, check email, look up a loca­tion on Gmaps… don’t worry about dis­tri­b­u­tion, just put ‘em on an inter­net server. They’re easy to update, just update it on your server. They’re secure, and they run securely sand­boxed on the iPhone. And guess what, there’s no SDK you need! You’ve got every­thing you need if you can write mod­ern web apps…”

With Steve’s seal of approval, the app was approved.

iPod

The last of the big 4 to be issued such rejec­tion was unsur­pris­ingly the iPod func­tion­al­ity. It has long been rumored that the rea­son for such rejec­tion was largely due to the head of the iPod divi­sion send­ing out a company-wide voice­mail to express his frus­tra­tion at the inclu­sion of iPod func­tion­al­ity. How­ever, due to the offen­sive nature of the lan­guage used in that mes­sage, few have been will­ing to pro­vide any infor­ma­tion about it. An iPod-compliant file was pro­vided to TNL.net and, after spend­ing sev­eral months try­ing to clean up the lan­guage, we are pro­vid­ing the clean­est excerpt we could, blank­ing out offen­sive words (reader’s dis­cre­tion is advised):

iPod divi­sion head: Why you #### ##### ##### ##### ######## ######### ###### ####### ####### ######### can­ni­bal­ize the iPod mar­ket #### ###### ############### ####### ###### hurt mar­gins ######## ####### ###### kill the com­pany ####### ####### Steve will hear about this.

While we do not traf­fic in rumors, some peo­ple say­hat, after his meet­ing with Steve Jobs, the man­ager was never heard of again.

In the next entry, we will review some of the other appli­ca­tions that felt the sharp edge of the reviewer’s pen, pro­vid­ing even fur­ther vis­i­bil­ity into the oth­er­wise opaque approach.

Update: Part 2 is now available.

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