iPhone App Censorship is ******* Ridiculous

I didn’t want this to become a censorship blog. I find writing about such things incredibly boring, but people keep doing stupid things. We’ve heard about state senators who want to ban swear words, but the latest to irk me is the Apple app store.

I’ve just submitted my 3rd attempt at an internet slang dictionary for the iPhone to the store. The first 2 were rejected because the definitions of words contained swear words. The second version had some of those swear words ***’d out, but it wasn’t good enough.

Why can’t there be swearing on the iPhone? Some uses (like a freaking dictionary) make sense to have swear words. This policy isn’t protecting anybody.

Think about it. My iPhone has full, unrestricted access to the internet. I can watch the 2 girls 1 cup video but I can’t see the word “ass” on an iPhone app? That doesn’t make sense.

I can swear in text messages, look at porn, cuss on the phone, and listen to music that has bad words in it – but I can’t have them in an application that I paid money for.

What’s the reason here?

At the very least, can’t you just put a note into my app saying that it has bad words and let people decide for themselves? The review process alone is stupid. What happened to the free market? Are you going to do this for Mac software next? You’re already doing it for iPhone accessories thanks to your stupid auth chip or whatever.

It’s going to be interesting to see what road Apple follows. If they start becoming software Nazis I might just have to switch back to Linux.

2 comments January 20th, 2009