Well, here’s one for the record books. Apple just rejected a developer’s app for violating its policies against pornographic content.
Nothing weird about that, except for the way that Apple went about it: by sending that developer pictures of a dude masturbating. What?
In a hysterical post over at Medium, developer Carl Smith talks about how Apple went about rejecting a new app that could be used — inadvertently — to view porn:
It turns out Apple thought the best way to tell us our app could be used to surf porn was to surf for porn using our app. Then send us some pictures and say take a look at these! Except they said, “Please see the attached screenshot for more information.” So with no warning…
CLICK — Well hello there handsome!
And here’s the (very) censored pic:
Smith says he understands Apple’s point: they wanted his company to improve the ability to flag inappropriate content in the app.
But needless to say, Smith thinks there were better ways for Apple to prove that the app could potentially be pornographic:
Apple sent us pornography without trying to mask it and with no warning of what we were going to see. This means they exposed employees of my company to things Apple themselves said was objectionable. How is this acceptable?
Frankly, this sounds like a one-off blunder on the part of an App Store review team member, and not something Cupertino is likely to make a habit of.
As far as I’m concerned, though, if Apple’s going to start sending porn to every developer who gets his app rejected, though, maybe it’s time to submit more apps!
Source: Medium
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
13 responses to “Apple just rejected an app by sending out pics of a dude masturbating”
…every developer who gets his app rejected…
Is every app developer male?
It is interesting that ‘Cult 0f Mac’ would just laugh something like this off. In the light of ‘GamerGate’ do you really think this will be taken lightly if its not fake?
Lets see – Apple announces major profits and rich in cash -> Apple sends porn -> (any guesses what is next? – hint ‘it may involve lawyers’)…
Why does this sound like it’s made up? because the Dev says it’s true.. or the Dev just wants attention? This sounds bogus.. Do you guys even bother to ask yourselves if its real? or do you just not care anymore?
As for click bait.. I’ve blocked all AD’s on this site in protest of the click bait mentality of your tactics.
That’s an awesome tactic. What service do you suggest that will work with Safari?
adblock
safari needs cockblock.
good point. Devs that get rejected love to go media whoring for attention so for all we know this story is totally false. Or it’s true to a degree but they missed telling us the part where they tried to appeal the rejection saying no such thing happens and the reviewer sent back ‘censored’ photos to prove that yes it does
The fappening 3 for fapp developers
This sounds fake. I will not believe it until there is good documented evidence. What’s in this article doesn’t prove anything.
One of my apps deal with UGC, photos specifically, and when we initially submitted it, we got rejected, but they pointed out the section of the policy guide about the potential for pornographic content.
We simply had to bump up the rating level and submit an explanation about our curation and content reporting controls. Available in the store within 2-3 hours after our response (and change to the meta-data).
We’ve since “white labeled” the same core app for several customers and in advance explained the use, curation controls, etc., and haven’t been rejected since.
Also, how was this image sent? Correspondence with the App Review team occurs through the Resolution Center, it’s a simple, messaging interface. Was the image linked to an external image server? Did it supposedly come directly through an email (App Review never contacts developers directly over an app rejection).
Sorry, but this sounds like bullshit.
“Apple just rejected an app by sending out pics of a dude masturbating”
Yeah, this is a “story” we *really* need to read. C’mon John, you used to be better than this. Is it the word “masturbating” that’s interesting to you, or that you thought we be interesting to use? We’re not all fans of adolescent “Beavis and Butthead” humor. Thousands and thousands of apps get rejected for all kinds of reasons. Why not just post a list (or better yet a link) to all of them. Then we can pick and choose to read about this silly subject… when we have nothing better to do.
This is hilarious. But, yet another slip by Apple this year. What exactly is going on over there!?
I doubt that it is any kind of policy by Apple. Some reviewer went overboard to make a point.
that said, the developer is all up in arms about his/her employees being exposed to porn but doesn’t seem to concerned about the users.