Apple rejects QuackPhone app for “minimal user functionality”

Apple’s App Store Approval Process is often too arbitrary or subjective by half, but no matter how you feel about the latest app rejection to storm the newsfeeds, at least their rationale makes sense: QuackPhone, an app developed by Nick Bonatsakis of Atlantia Software, was rejected for “containing minimal user functionality.” In other words, the app — which made your iPhone quack like a duck — just didn’t do enough for Apple’s tastes.

From a critical perspective, it’s hard to argue with that logic: the App Store is already distressingly filled with lazily programmed and tasteless sound board apps that will allow your iPhone to simulate everything from the sound of a braying jackass to the flatulation of a loose rectum. A higher signal to noise ratio on the App Store is in everyone’s best interests.

But while most people can probably do without these kind of apps, the real issue with Apple rejecting them outright is the old slippery slope argument: exactly how much “functionality” does an app need to have to be approved on the App Store, and isn’t this sort of rejection just really a veiled editorial move on Apple’s part? If an app is open and honest about what it does, who is Apple to say that its users aren’t allowed to use it? If iPhone owners want their handsets to quack like a duck, just what’s the big deal, outside of Apple’s own arbitrary distaste at the concept?

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