When Howard Met Apple: The App Store’s Censorship Problem
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We here at Chelsea Green still don’t know for sure why Apple delayed the approval and release of Howard Dean’s iPhone app—though we suspect the politically sensitive nature of the book may have had something to do with it. Just two weeks ago, Apple rejected an app (iSinglePayer) that was basically an activist toolkit promoting a Canadian-style single-payer healthcare system (although they’ve since reversed course and approved the app, likely in response to criticism).
TechPresident.com’s Nancy Scola spoke to the Howard Dean app’s developer Kyle Shank to hear his take on the story, and went after Apple for its inconsistent (and highly questionable) approval process.
Chelsea Green, the progressive press imprint, is asking whether politics are behind the fact that the iPhone app for its Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform took more than two months to get out of Apple’s approval purgatory and into the iTunes Store, now that there have been reports that Apple turned down a single-payer health care app because of its politics. There aren’t isolated incidents of troubles with the iTunes Store. TechCrunch has been chronicling developers’ woes with getting apps rejected, getting updates rejected, and getting apps approved and then yanked. Apple has conceded that the iTunes app process has problems. But are politics at play in the Dean book case? Maybe. Maybe the Apple reviewer assigned to the Dean app is is a hardcore libertarian, personally affronted by the very idea of a government organized health care option. Or maybe the reviewer was beaten up in grade school by bullies named “Howard” and “Dean.” The thing is, in some ways it really doesn’t matter. The iTunes Store is Apple’s world, and we just live — increasingly — in it.
Kyle Shank is an independent developer who worked with the WebStrong Group to build the Dean book app. I spoke with him about his experience with the approval process. Absent FCC intervention, Apple, he says, “can pretty much arbitrarily determine if you exist in the app store.” The nature of the iTunes Store environment is, as Shank’s troubles suggest, something that political programmers might be wise to keep in mind.
Shank submitted the Dean app to Apple on June 10th, he says, and for a process full of glitches the first hiccup might have been time. The new iPhone and operating system keep out shortly after, and iPhone reviewers were likely flooded by updates sent in by developers for mandatory approval. Shank waited. And waited. “We didn’t hear anything for five and a half weeks,” he says. The first real contact from the company came in the form of notice that the app he had submitted was corrupted, and couldn’t even be open. He resubmitted a clean build, he says, within the day. The next problem popped up a week and a half later. Apple said the Dean app needed a pop-up at some points letting the user know that he or she wasn’t connected to the Internet. Shank, in his professional judgment, didn’t think the warning screen was necessary. Apple did. Guess who won?
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