Apple Bans Game App That Criticizes Smartphone Production 213
An anonymous reader sends word that Apple has removed from the App Store a game called Phone Story, which walks players through the creation of a smartphone, highlighting many of the negative aspects. There are four brief stages: running a mining facility in the Congo, saving suicidal factory workers, handing out phones to oblivious consumers, and generating e-waste through planned obsolescence. Apple said Phone Story violated sections 15.2, 16.1, 21.1, and 21.2 of the App Store guidelines, which make reference to "objectionable or crude content" and "offensive or mean-spirited commentary." A short video of the game has been posted at Kotaku.
No win, really (Score:5, Interesting)
Allowing the application will reflect negatively on Apple just as much as censoring it (and not for reasons having to do with whether the criticism has substance). I can just imagine the headlines: "Apple is so dumb they will sell you the rope you can hang them with".
Apple/Scientology? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've always jokingly called apple the "Cult of Macintology", but now it's even more obvious. The cult of $cientology sue people when they don't like what they're saying, Apple also take action (by the sole means they can) by killing off criticism.
Can anyone say Streisand effect?
Re:Why am I so surprised :) (Score:3, Interesting)
Simple Rules in business:
Don't tell Big Tobacco that smoking kills.
Don't tell Big Fast Food that their food is unhealthy.
Don't tell Big Pharma that they peddle snake oil pills driven to consumers by fear they (Big Pharma) create.
Apparently we can now add:
Don't tell Big Communications that their industry has any sort of faults or makes a buck off the backs of kids in poor-shit-hole-third-world countries.
Also in the agreement: 16.1 Apps that present excessively objectionable or crude content will be rejected
When Apple says "Questionable" they don't mean "questionable to the general public" - they mean "questionable to an Apple executive".
Harness Streisand Effects for free publicity (Score:1, Interesting)
Golden age of app distribution over? Can't get your crummy apps seen or sold? Want armfuls of publicity for your company/cause?
1. Write an app that deliberately criticises the smartphone production process, dish out lots of dirt over alleged sweatshops, suicides etc. ..
2. Wait for the ban.
3. Pow! Instant news story! The tech press will lap it up! Anti-apple and Apple fanbois will whip it into a frenzy. Folks will relish being the first to spot a potential Streisand Effect.
4
5. Profit*??
(*or at least tons of free exposure)
Re:Fuck you apple (Score:2, Interesting)
No, my point to you was that in any Apple thread, regardless of what it's really about, there's always a flurry of /. posts about how Apple doesn't innovate, only steals, about how they take concepts that Linux and OSS was doing years ago and then "claim to invent" them and call them "magical" etc, and yet here you are claiming that Apple *are* the innovators and inventors of the smartphone.
I'm not under any illusion that Apple were not the first to make a smartphone, or mp3 player, or all-in-one computer, or tablet, or online music store - it's only the rabid Apple haters who claim that's what Apple fans believe. What I tend to point out is that they are very good at popularising what was formerly a niche, or at the very least getting into a market just as it's about to go huge - something they have proved many times with many "hits" (and a few flops too, along the way).
It's just amusing to see an Apple Troll claiming that the smartphone was all Apple's innovation for once. (It wasn't of course, but I guess it's true now - you Apple Haters are so vehement about being right that it must be).
Re:Why am I so surprised :) (Score:3, Interesting)