Apple says you can’t be an iPhone Jesus
The series of flaps over the approval of apps at the Apple App Store continues unabated, with the latest imbroglio involving whether or not an app user should be able to impersonate religious figures.
The App Store has rejected an app named Me So Holy, submitted by developer Benjamin Kahle. The app would have allowed users to take a photo of a person using the iPhone’s camera and then to scale and move that image so that the face in the photo fill in the facial space cut out of a picture of a famous religious figure of your choice, according to a Wired story. Think of placing a graphic of Jesus with the face cut out over the faces in family photos until you find one that fits.
It is the opinion of the Apple app approval team that the Me So Holy app violated the portion of the iPhone developers agreement that 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 judgment may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”
Although it does not say so directly, this provision is trying to perform the always difficult job of weeding out items that are in glaringly bad taste. The app that started this series of ridiculous situations was one in which you had to shake a baby to death in order to win the “game.” That app was approved and released, then met the completely predictable firestorm of complaints from parents who were not amused to see infants killed for developer profit.
The Me So Holy app would have met with the same sort of reception should it have been released, and it too would have been withdrawn. Apple is just leaving out the drama and cutting directly to the chase with this new app. To their credit, they are doing so right up front and not taking advantage of the limitless publicity that always accompanies excursions into bad taste. The public appetite for bad taste is, of course, limitless.
There is a school of thought that anything is funny as long as it offends a large number of people. This seems to work pretty well among middle school adolescent boys as long as it is confined to the school rest room. It does not work nearly as well in a world of adults, some of whom have matured beyond the middle school level. But some boys never grow up, and Apple finds itself in the uncomfortable position of being the hall monitor in charge of chastising little boys exercising their right to bad taste.
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May 12th, 2009
What’s wrong with wanting to look like an imaginary figure? As always, it’s hard to be the arbiter on what will cause offense. Unless of course Jesus decided to sue.. which would be pretty interesting.
May 12th, 2009
Well said! As a former middle school adolescent boy and now parent, I agree.
May 13th, 2009
Well, it’s all the more interesting given that the most widely circulated images of “jesus,” at least in the part of the world, tend to show a rather pale Caucasian-featured guy and that is at best pure fantasy.
People and their illusions…