A couple of weeks back, we posted two applications for the iPhone to the Apple review process. We’re pretty familiar with it now, but its subjectiveness is pretty overwhelming. The two applications we posted were political satire apps called Whack a Republican and Whack a Democrat (we are equally opportunity satirists!). After several weeks of review we had begun to get a pretty bad feeling about them - not to mention we were running out of time if we wanted to get them out before the election. Over the weekend we recieved our response from Apple - not good news.

Whack a Republican
“Dear Developer,
Thank you for submitting Whack a Republican to the App Store. We’ve reviewed Whack a Republican and determined that we cannot post this version of your Phone application to the App Store because it contains content that ridicules public figures and 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.”
If you believe that you can make the necessary changes so that Whack a Republican does not violate the iPhone SDK Agreement we encourage you to do so and resubmit it for review.
Regards,
iPhone Developer Program”
The games are basically reskinned versions of our Whack a Gopher game with added sound/animations and a bit more complexity. We have a few sound bytes and such along with our custom graphics - but seriously. Our we berating anyone? Sure we poke fun at both candidates but no more than any other media outlet. I guess you the end user will never get a chance to know though, since Apple intervened on your behalf.
The way Apple has censored the iPhone applications has me for one very confused. What precedent are they following?
Music - Apple has no problem posting for sale material with explicit content
Movies - Rated R? No problem.
PodCasts - Pretty much anything goes.
Applications - A bit of risky content? A political Satire? OH NO! We can’t have our customers seeing any of that! Sorry please change your app so that its suitable for any child 5 and under or we’re not going to post it.
So my questiona are:
Why?
Why the discrimination towards applications that are obviously not applied to the rest of the offerings on iTunes?
What?
Whats the Risk? My guess is that any kid downloading an app has pretty much the same opportunity to download explicit content music or movies just as easy. As a developer, I would be extremely happy with the idea of having my application marked with a rating or otherwise denoted as explicit what have you if it ensured that the community could review the application for what it is.
How?
How can we possibly predict what Apple will find offensive or against their policies. Based on our Spin the Bottle / Truth or Dare experience it truly seems like it depends on who is assigned to review your application. Re-submit and you might get lucky.

Whack a Democrat
I know that the Apple mechanism is a heck of a lot better than other mobile platforms. I also like the fact that Apple promotes the applications for me through iTunes - its a great platform for deliver and reaches a huge audience. However, I for one would like to have a much better idea of why the limitations are there regarding the application content so that we can better judge what to spend time on and what we can simply blow off as another wasted effort.
I for one will be hoping that Apple changes its policies to be more inline with their other media offerings and stop hating on the app developers.
Let the customer decide!
For some more information on Apple headaches - check out my friend Jeff Branc’s blog on the same topic.