The rejection adds to the litany of complaints against Apple’s incredibly successful third-party market for its popular smartphone:
Apple rejected a free iPhone application that advocated a single-payer health system, calling the application “politically charged,” according to the app’s developer.
Red Daly, a 22 year-old computer science grad student at Stanford, submitted his iSinglePayer iPhone app for Apple’s approval on Aug. 21. A little more than a month later Apple rejected it on the grounds of its content, Daly told Wired.com.
And in other rotten Apple news…
Farhad Manjoo on Apple’s hypocritical move to block the Palm Pre from syncing with its iTunes software:
Apple itself hasn’t been shy about achieving compatibility through means that other companies consider “hacking.” Look at Samba, the fantastic open-source project that lets non-Windows computers connect to Windows networks. The project began as a hack: In 1991, Andrew Tridgell, then a Ph.D. student at the Australian National University, reverse-engineered the traffic on his local network to figure out how to communicate with Microsoft machines. Over several years, his effort grew into what is now the main way for Unix-based machines to share files with Windows. Microsoft long took a dim view of Samba; in 2007, after years of legal wrangling, European regulators forced it to allow Samba to interoperate freely with Windows. But Apple didn’t wait for that ruling—it built Samba into the Mac OS in 2002. In other words, so what if Microsoft didn’t like Samba? Apple needed to build an OS that connected to Windows, and Samba was the best way to accomplish that.
Apple often gets away with behavior we’d never sanction from other companies. If Microsoft began preventing rivals’ devices from connecting with Windows, the tech industry would go ape. If Google gave preferential treatment to its sites on its search engine, European regulators would threaten a lawsuit. Apple’s exclusionary ways weren’t very consequential when it was merely a tech-industry also-ran. But now that it’s a behemoth, we—its customers—should demand that it play by the same rules as everyone else.