Apple’s App Store Director Sells His Own Fart Apps

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/08/apple-fart-apps/

by bjonathan • 16 years ago

117 48 16 years ago

wired.com

mxavier• 16 years ago

I really could have gone the whole day without seeing a cartoon panda's anus.

brudgers• 16 years ago

And if you need a cartoon picture of a panda's anus...well there's an app for that too.

mkramlich2• 16 years ago

Thankfully Apple's curated walled garden approach to ensuring quality (keeping out Flash, Python, Java, Ruby, anything "obscene", competitive functionality, etc.) still managed to allow cartoon panda anus farting!

msbarnett3• 16 years ago

I'm really struggling to be offended that this guy is making money on a side business selling things that people buy, even if I wouldn't personally buy them and think they are kind of puerile.

chc6• 16 years ago

How about the fact that the same guy institutes policies that ban huge swaths of apps (including anything not written in Objective-C)?

msbarnett3• 16 years ago

Unless there's some kind of assertion here that Python-based fart apps would eat his lunch if only he would allow them, I'm not seeing the problem.

jon_hendry• 16 years ago

"How about the fact that the same guy institutes policies that ban huge swaths of apps (including anything not written in Objective-C)?"

I doubt the ObjC/C++/C requirement was his call. He may be in charge of enforcing it, but something like that would have come from higher up.

jcl• 16 years ago

I guess the article's author wants us to contrast the puerility of the director's apps with the fact that it's his job to decide which apps get rejected on the basis of content.

But maybe this is exactly the kind of person one would want in charge of the decision-making process? ...someone who knows that if the content bar is set too high, he would never have gotten into the app store -- and his current job.

lallysingh• 16 years ago

Sadly no; I suspect that if he's lowering the bar here, he has to unreasonably raise it somewhere else to make him look like he's doing his job. Considering the infamous reasons apps have been rejected, I'm not sure I'm wrong on this.

naner• 16 years ago

He was embarrassed enough to try and purge all history connecting him to his company's apps. I think that says enough. I'm not offended, but I think that it is pretty low class.

That being said, I don't know if this character assassination by Wired is warranted. It is just some idiot selling fart apps. Not exactly newsworthy.

eitland• 16 years ago

>Not exactly newsworthy.

Except that he is now on the othe side of the table.

mikeryan• 16 years ago

BTW, in case you don't make it the last page - it looks like most of these apps were already in the Apple review process before he got hired.

jackolas• 16 years ago

I don't know who that makes look worse, apple for hiring a fart developer or the fart developer for you know making ifart apps.

ugh3• 16 years ago

I’m not really sure why developers of fart apps are automatically off limits or embarrassing.

GBond• 16 years ago

Does a Panda's anus warrant a "Mature 17+" label? Or is that only for animated boobs?

danh• 16 years ago

I would hesitate to call it "mature".

rryyan• 16 years ago

As an aside: I thought this quote from an Apple spokesperson was interesting, given Microsoft's plan to encourage employees to develop Windows Phone apps "in their spare time" [1]:

"Apple’s policy allows for employees to have apps on the App Store if they’re developed and published prior to their start at Apple."

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/microsoft-wants-employees...

wallflower• 16 years ago

When I was at WWDC, there was an Apple engineer named Eliza Block. She and her partner gave a really good (best of WWDC) presentation on Designing Scroll View UIs. Her name seemed familiar so I googled it and it turns out she was the author of a very successful iPhone app. Apparently, she probably got recruited or asked to become an iPhone Applications Engineer at Apple. A testament to her software development ability (the googled articles said she was a graduate Philosophy student).

neild• 16 years ago

She's the author of my favorite iPhone crossword app. Good on her for getting hired by Apple, although I'm a bit sad if that's the reason there's no iPad version of 2 Across.

arn• 16 years ago

Eliza was actually the first App Store success story, inspiring many to follow:

http://www.macrumors.com/2008/08/01/iphone-app-store-numbers...

mdonahoe• 16 years ago

And now they drag him through the mud: http://valleywag.gawker.com/5615971/apples-freedom-from-porn...

the danger of using auto-follow services on twitter.

NonIdentifiable• 16 years ago

Except they pretty much disproved the auto-follow stuff ...

jonhendry• 16 years ago

Uh, right. I'm sure he intentionally followed an escort service in Hyderabad. (Or, more likely, a spammy website that claims to be a Hyderabad escort service.) And one in New Delhi.

I might believe it if the escorts were from San Francisco, LA, Vegas. But India? It seems unlikely that he's a frequent visitor to India in a context where he'd want to link escort services in two cities there.

Please. Web savvy fail. Most likely somebody with a 'circle jerk' ring of bogus escort sites spammed twitter accounts and hit this guy's, and he didn't pay attention to it.

Tichy• 16 years ago

How did they disprove it? By showing that a lot of these follows happened close to each other? That seems perfectly explainable if one escort agency decided to start spamming and let their bots loose promoting several of their models at the same time.

mtholking4• 16 years ago

As an iPhone developer, I don't want to compete with a developer that also happens to oversee the entire App Store approval process.

chc6• 16 years ago

You already do. It's called Apple. If they want, they can just ban your app and make their own version. You just have to trust that they won't.

mtholking4• 16 years ago

Apple gets 30% of all revenue developers generate, so they aren't really competition.

Name one app that has existed on the App Store that Apple banned because they released their own version of it, and charged for it.

I trust that they want me to succeed to they get 30% of a much larger number.

mtholking4• 16 years ago

Apple has a total of 9 apps on the App Store out of >215k, I'll take those chances

masklinn• 16 years ago

You don't. His apps were developed and in the store before he was hired, Apple's policy doesn't seem to allow their own employees to develop appstore apps in their spare time, and only allows them to have stuff in the appstore (in their name) if that stuff was there before they got hired.

Which is what happened in this case.

blizkreeg• 16 years ago

The title made my day.

mkramlich2• 16 years ago

This story has strangely made me think of the "eat your own dogfood" principle.

Hexstream• 16 years ago

"Still, it comes off as hypocritical that a director of the App Store sells apps that some might call inappropriate, said Ben Kahle, developer of Me So Holy, a satiric religious app that Apple rejected in mid-2009 for containing “objectionable material.” Kahle said after he re-submitted the app to the store, an Apple employee called him and said Me So Holy would “never” be approved."

Obvious stuff. Never underestimate the power of well-established special interest groups. There's no powerful interest group against farts so of course it's not considered "objectionable", unlike religion.

Apple’s App Store Director Sells His Own Fart Apps

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