Apple App Store changes continue
Apple is seemingly on a systematic campaign to make changes in the often inscrutable policies which govern its App Store, probably in order to do so before the iPad makes its debut in a very few weeks.
There have been a lot of changes in the app store over the last several weeks. As always, each change has rankled a certain group of developers and have seemed at least a little capricious to many within Apple’s iPhone app developer community. First, Cupertino pulled almost all of the “sexy†apps out of the store, although it did leave magazines like Playboy and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition alone, demonstrating very clear double standards in the matter of showing skin, according to a Washington Post blog.
Then Apple threw out all apps that used a specific part of the iPhone SDK to actively seek, on the fly, Wi-fi connections that are immediately available to users, though it left those apps that simply contained lists of Wi-Fi connection near a GPS location. Apparently, the Wi-Fi seeking function violated a developer agreement rule against using private operating system frameworks that developers were not supposed to access, though the Wi-Fi seeking apps had been in the store for quite some time. A few days later, Apple decided to remove apps that it termed to be “cookie cutter,†formulaic apps that did one very simple thing and were based on the easily obtainable simple code.
Though developers may consider these sorts of changes in policy to be capricious and illogical, each developer signed an agreement that allows Apple to take exactly the sort of actions that they have. That the agreement they signed is less than equaniminous should be no surprise; the Apple app developer agreement has always been a pretty one-sided document. The latest leaked agreement does not seem to be much different from the last leaked agreement. In essence, Apple can do just about what it wants when it comes to approving or disapproving app for the App Store, and can pretty much take out at a later date anything it lets in. That should not be a surprise for people that know Apple: they are very distinctly into controlling all things Apple, regardless.
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