Vast legions of iPhone fart app developers may be be quaking in their parping shoes today at the news that Apple has just turned down an app because it only offered, “minimal user functionality.”
Like its name suggests, the app in question – the QuackPhone, created by Nick Bonatsakis of Atlantia Software – simply created amusing duck like noises for $0.99, but was sharply rebuffed by Apple, who despatched the following rejection letter:
Dear Atlantia Software LLC,
We’ve reviewed your application DuckPhone and we have determined that this application contains minimal user functionality and will not be appropriate for the App Store.
If you would like to share it with friends and family, we recommend you review the Ad Hoc method on the Distribution tab of the iPhone Developer Portal for details on distributing this application among a small group of people of your choosing or if you believe that you can add additional user functionality to DuckPhone we encourage you to do so and resubmit it for review.
Sincerely,
iPhone App Review Team
With an entire cottage industry churning out similarly pointless apps on a daily basis, we imagine there’s quite a lot of developers who must be feeling mighty concerned if this marks the start of a clamp down by Apple.
If it proves to be another round of apps being arbitrarily banned from the App Store, it may seriously hurt some of these small time developers – although with Apple seemingly making up the rules as they go along, you can never be sure what’s going on.
Some consumers however, may be rejoicing if it turns out that Apple is (belatedly) closing the door on the tidal wave of endless crap that continues to clog up the store.
Would anyone really care much if 500 fart apps were quietly silenced?
Update: 6th March
Great news quack fans! Apple has finally let the duck app through:
I’m happy to report that after some slight additions to the application, and a re-submit, it is now live in the iTunes App Store in all its’ quackarific glory. I don’t know if I’d consider it a victory against Apple, but I suppose it is a lesson to developers that persistence is the only option if you want to survive in the app store.
At last, final recognition that the much vaunted statistic that there’s 100,000+ apps available on the iphone store… OMG 100,000!… is actually filled with 99% utter dirge… and also means comparing this figure to the 20,000 on Android and however many available on Ovi is a completely meaningless mission.