Apple / Amazon / Censorship

Apple gets pounded for having an often incomprehensible approval process for applications submitted to the App store. Pretty much weekly there is yet another app that gets rejected often in opposition to some other app that was previously approved. Sometimes just an update to an app already approved will get rejected (NIN / Trent Resnor’s application comes to mind)

How amazon figures in to this post is their huge snafu when supposedly some code monkey “accidentally” flipped a switch that caused any book that even hinted at gay content to be blocked from being reviewed or coming up on searches. After a huge uproar this was “fixed”. I was suspicious but their explanation was believable. Now however I am stepping back and wondering if it was some sort of collusion between Amazon and Apple (at Apples insistence) that those books be VERY hard to come across. You see Amazon just recently launched their Kindle application for the iPhone and Apple has no direct control over the content viewable within that application. So it is pretty easy to see Apple putting the screws to amazon and finding a way to impede users reading what they want to read.

What popped the light bulb on this was another story about a rejected application, coincidentally another e-book reader. Saw this story on Just Another iPhone Blog. So apparently this nice new app which allows access to all the books available on Project Gutenberg, which much to Apples prudishness include the Kama Sutra. So when one of the reviewers specifically searched for Kama Sutra, they found it and rejected the application (called Eucalyptus).

This whole mess for Apple has to be a huge pain, I sort of sympathize with them, but they are so arbitrary in what gets banned and what doesn’t that my sympathy is fleeting. I really feel sorry for someone who spends the time to develop what looks like a nice little application to get shut down for providing access to content that is freely available on the internet, including the Safari browser ON THE iPhone!