I’m not going to get too worked up over Apple’s rejection of Eucalyptus — a basic eBook reader — on the grounds that it can be used to download a public domain translation of the Kama Sutra. Which Kindle and Stanza and Safari and plenty of other iPhone apps can already do.
I’m not gonna get worked up because this will get overturned. We’ve got a pattern now.
Somewhere in Apple is a dopey little department full of dopey little people crew of handsome people (see update) whose job is to review every iPhone app submission. Unfortunately it is a job description that lends itself to Cover Your Ass mentality. I’m sure their instructions boil down to: “If this might make Apple look bad to our lowest common denominator customer, reject it.”
An app rejected on non-technical grounds ought to be subjected to a secondary and even tertiary review; nobody knows what’s happening behind that door, but I’m skeptical that this level of scrutiny is happening because, while one guy might be dumb enough to reject an app like Eucalyptus, I don’t think three guys would.
Who Apple is trying to appease here? By appealing to the soccer moms who would theoretically get worked up over Victorian translations of Tantric Sex How-To’s, they’re alienating the nerds. That kind of makes sense; the iPhone is a mainstream phenomenon and their audience is an order of magnitude larger than Us. But Apple is also a company that has proudly been willing to say, “We don’t want the most customers, we want the best customers.” That ought to factor into the app submission policy someplace.
INCIDENTALLY: for all our enthusiasm about the future, it seems like dealing with corporations has never been more futile. Place a phone call to Google or Amazon sometime. I don’t know whom James of Eucalyptus even thinks he’s bothering with.
