Apple rejects Drones+ thrice. App maker looks to Android

This is exactly why I switched to Android a year ago.<p>Smartphones are not trivial consumer electronics devices: they are sophisticated computers, and increasingly are our primary portals to the wider world. Any central authority that governs what you are and are not allowed to do with your smartphone is thus an incredibly powerful political actor. It would be scary enough if such an actor were governed by the democratic state, which had at least some theoretical accountability to the general population. Apple, however, does not have even the pretence of that kind of accountability.<p>I'm somebody who has publicly castigated RMS for being an alarmist and a zealot, but here I have to agree with him 100%: this is an issue with profoundly negative implications for the development of a healthy and democratic civil society. If walled gardens like this are going to become increasingly dominant, then I honestly fear for the future.

"You're sitting at Starbucks one day, sipping your grande non-fat double shot mocha latte, reading the Huffington Post on your iPad and idly checking Twitter on your white iPhone 4S.<p>And that's when it happens.<p>A push notification from Drones+: Another drone strike in Pakistan kills 17 suspected militants.<p>You turn to your friend, but he's already looking at you (he also has a white iPhone 4S). "They've done it again", you say. "I know, it's absolutely terrible isn't it? We live in such a terrible oppressive country", he says.<p>You take another sip of your grande non-fat double shot mocha latte and nod in solemn agreement with your friend. Having completed the ritual, mutually acknowledging each others enlightened sense of worldliness, you return to reading the Huffington Post and checking Twitter.<p>"Thanks Drones+!", you say silently to yourself." -- Someones comment before deletion. To great for deletion.

"We found that your app contains content that many audiences would find objectionable, which is not in compliance with the App Store guidelines"<p>Incredible. They'd better ban all newspapers as well.

&#62; “I didn’t really expect anyone to download the app if it was in the App Store,” Begley said.<p>&#62; “That was the point; I don’t think people want to know when a drone strikes.”<p>So, what <i>was</i> the point, then... to waste a bunch of peoples' time?<p>(edit: To the people downvoting me: mind explaining what the point was? I run Cydia, the alternative to the App Store that people are saying should host this instead, and honestly if someone came to me with something like this that didn't work the first two times and in the end resulted in tons of questions regarding what kind of response it would have, leading to some massive discussion, and then I found out that the developer didn't even expect anyone at all to download it ever and that <i>was the point</i> I'd be really pissed that he had wasted a ton of peoples' time in the review pipeline working on a project that was designed with nothing more than the intent to troll the system.)

This seems like a classic case of an app that shouldn't be an app. If you really want to push out notices to people every time there's a drone strike, why not send out emails? Or tweets? Or notifications over any of the myriad instant messaging platforms that already have iOS clients? Not only does it bypass apple's silly app store restrictions, it offers a much better experience for a much wider variety of users.<p>The only reason I see that makes the app store the best place for this is that app store users like to throw money at silly things they don't need, and the primary reason this is true is because apple has fostered an environment that makes it true. If apple feels that the presence of a drone strike app will make people less inclined to spend money in their store, that is exactly the sort of decision that this app developer is trying to capitalize on. It just went the wronG way for him this time.

Unfortunately this is one of the risks when you develop for the iOS platform (although I find it hard to see why this is objectionable. I could understand the military objecting but it seems he is just curating publicly available information.).<p>It doesn't sound like it was a very complex app so hopefully he can port it to Android or the Web easily and make it available. It sounds useful.

In the long run I think iOS's more locked down console model is going to hand the market to Android.

That really lags.<p>Software should be protected by free speech guarantees.<p>It looks like the developers just use open news data for this - nothing wrong with the doing this.<p>Pardon the self-plug here but I blogged today about why I hope not to buy anymore Apple products: <a href="http://blog.markwatson.com/2012/09/can-we-agree-to-stop-buying-apple.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.markwatson.com/2012/09/can-we-agree-to-stop-buyi...</a>

Put it up on Cydia in the meantime. Many of us with jail broken phones would like to see it.

If Begley can get himself unmarried from the need for push notifications, this could totally be a mobile web app running on any smart phone with a decent browser. And as someone else suggested, notifications could be tweets or emails. I'm curious as to what he believes the value-add of push notifications are (as opposed to having the freshest data retrieved and live updates while the app is running).

iOS privacy app returns as a web app<p>Bitdefender says that Apple removed the application, which previously was a paid product, from the iOS App Store in June, but hasn't given it a reason for doing so. A potential cause could have been that Clueful tried to auto-detect a user's installed iOS apps so it could then display information about them.<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4460509" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4460509</a>

Is there a delay built in to marking drone strikes? I could see the US gov't not wanting a realtime feed of drone locations.

Don't. Write it in Javascript and serve it around the store with no ristrictions. That way you can later wrap it in phonegab and ship it to both platforms.

It's sad that everyone of these threads has the same three people defending Apple no matter what the reason or circumstance. Come on. It's embarrassing to watch.