Apple rejects Drones+ thrice. App maker looks to Android

http://dawn.com/2012/08/31/after-rejection-from-apple-drone-strike-tracking-app-maker-looks-to-android/

by jahansafd • 14 years ago

88 92 14 years ago

tomjen32• 14 years ago

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.

sixcorners• 14 years ago

Can you push notifications to the device from Javascript?

lukifer• 14 years ago

There's a PhoneGap plugin that does push notifications.

tomjen32• 14 years ago

No. Not that I know of.

But you save that feature for when it gets into the store -- it will properly piss of people anyway.

myko• 14 years ago

Is it possible to make PhoneGap applications that don't look like complete garbage on Android? I only ever see apps that look like skeumorphic iOS app clones.

Last I checked it seemed like if you wanted ActionBar and such you'd end up writing quite a bit of native stuff anyway, so at that point it didn't seem worth using PhoneGap.

k-mcgrady• 14 years ago

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.).

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.

TillE• 14 years ago

"We found that your app contains content that many audiences would find objectionable, which is not in compliance with the App Store guidelines"

Incredible. They'd better ban all newspapers as well.

Foy• 14 years ago

Don't forget they told him this after they had rejected it twice previously on technical grounds.

I think that this was clearly their issue but they tried to dissuade him with bogus technical reasons first to give him the runaround. After he "fixed" whatever technical issues were there not once, but twice, they finally told him the real reason they wouldn't accept it. I think that's what really frustrates me the most about this story.

ThJ• 14 years ago

Oh for...

While newspapers may report on drone strikes, that's not their primary function. The primary function of this app is obviously to make a bold statement about the atrocities of war.

Apple doesn't want to publish an app that is designed to provoke the audience. Apple can't let just anyone post apps to the App Store, because the whole idea behind that store is to provide products that meet minimum quality requirements, so users don't have to search through all the crap to find the good stuff.

Letting everyone publish would drown out many good apps in favor of shit. Letting everyone publish often gives you problems with system stability from poorly witten code, something I've encountered on several Android phones.

The iDevices are NOT computers. They're digital appliances. How often do you hear people complain that they can't modify the source code of their microwave or their car. Hardly ever, because expectations are different.

Apple's policies make perfect sense if you view it their products same way you view a TV. They're not designed for nerds!

demione• 14 years ago

Ironic; one could just as very well claim that America's mainstream media is among the most hype-driven in the world. Conversely, one could also make the claim that an app line Drones+ aims to take the hype out of the equation, by offering no-nonsense factual data.

cygx2• 14 years ago

The iDevices are NOT computers.

In contrast to 'dumbphones' or some so-called 'feature phones', the current generation of smartphones are general-purpose computing devices.

zyb09• 14 years ago

Yeah knowing about drone strikes may provoke the audience! No need for people to think about stuff like that, they aren't nerds!

mikeash• 14 years ago

Apple can't let just anyone post apps to the App Store, because the whole idea behind that store is to provide products that meet minimum quality requirements, so users don't have to search through all the crap to find the good stuff.

I just wanted to extract this out into its own post. I don't believe it requires any additional commentary.

tripzilch6• 14 years ago

> While newspapers may report on drone strikes, that's not their primary function. The primary function of this app is obviously to make a bold statement about the atrocities of war.

The current primary function of most major newspapers however, seems to be to not make any statement either way, bold or not, and to ignore what's happening. People are being killed with the blood on the hands of the US, but because your soldiers are not directly involved, it's not being reported on, as if it's a minor thing.

It's not newspapers, it's information channels that tow the party line.

> Apple doesn't want to publish an app that is designed to provoke the audience.

Unless it's political cartoons. But only if you win a Pulitzer first and Steve jumps in ( http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/04/apple-approves-pulitzer-win... ).

> Letting everyone publish would drown out many good apps in favor of shit.

Everybody thinks their own shit don't smell. Personally I think a large chunk of the bland useless turds found on the Apple Appstore is a lot of shit[1], and a DroneTracker app is in fact pretty damn cool, original and fresh.

[1] I wouldn't normally do this on HN but since you've started it, I can enjoy slinging projectile poop as much as the next monkey.

api• 14 years ago

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

Steko8• 14 years ago

It stands to reason that if this were really important and was going to cost Apple significant market share they would revisit their approval policies. I imagine Apple thinks it's policies on net improve their profits so that's why those policies exist.

Apple rejecting certain apps and people on HN flipping out about it isn't new. It's been happening for years. The iOS App Store is still killing it despite a lower installed base then Android.

I agree Android will eventually win on market share but the reasons will be because Apple insists on a high margin and few form factors. Long term that cedes a large part of the market.

hristov• 14 years ago

Is going to? Try "already did".

arrrg• 14 years ago

Price and variety. That’s the reason why more Android than iOS devices are selling.

Most certainly not Apple’s App Store policies.

nkoren• 14 years ago

This is exactly why I switched to Android a year ago.

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.

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.

Steko8• 14 years ago

"which had at least some theoretical accountability to the general population. Apple, however, does not have even the pretence of that kind of accountability."

Apple, like any for profit business, is certainly accountable to the market. I'm indifferent [1] to this app but maybe so many people are outraged that Apple reconsiders lest it's brand or market share suffer. Again I doubt that's going to happen. For one, this app works perfectly as a web app. If Apple were to start blocking the web I think I might join you and head for another platform but I don't see them doing that.

[1] I have a certain tolerance for crudeness and so I'm fine with this app but let's imagine there's a whole "morbid app tracking" section of the app store. Serial killers trackers, Rapes Near Me, etc. Is that something Apple wants to encourage? Probably not.

Daishiman2• 14 years ago

> Apple, like any for profit business, is certainly accountable to the market. I'm indifferent [1] to this app but maybe so many people are outraged that Apple reconsiders lest it's brand or market share suffer. Again I doubt that's going to happen. For one, this app works perfectly as a web app. If Apple were to start blocking the web I think I might join you and head for another platform but I don't see them doing that.

This is not a good argument. Public pressure for apps of this kind will always be relatively low, so other interests will almost always take precedence, which means that states can effectively use their leverage to block undesirable content with minimal consequences. It is effectively a form of soft censorship.

luriel• 14 years ago

> Apple, like any for profit business, is certainly accountable to the market.

Apple is also using the government to enforce a monopoly on some extremely basic ideas.

Thanks to the patent system the market around smartphones is not even remotely free, it requires billions of dollars and armies of lawyers to even have a chance of competing, and even then you might lose.

gardarh• 14 years ago

Seems to me that notifications were essential to the functionality of this app, you can't get that with a web app.

Of course the "web app is sufficient" point is irrelevant though, it's fundamentally weird that someone is making arbitrary decisions on which apps are allowed and which ones are not.

msabalau• 14 years ago

Is there any evidence to believe that anyone would have known of or cared about the app if it had been accepted? It seems likely that most people have only heard of it because of the rejection, first on "technical grounds", and then for the cowardly admission that they thought that people would find the content objectionable.

Apple certainly can run their store any way they want to. At the same time it's worth noting that compared, say, to standards set by bookstores and libraries which often contain material that many people would find offensive, Apple is acting, well, rather gutlessly.

One might have thought that the brand that they wanted to protect would have been that of a company that is not afraid to "think different" and that worked to ensure that "1984 is not like 1984". Evidently they'd rather throw away that brand equity and become as inoffensive as the local Walmart. Fine, noted.

biafra2• 14 years ago

How does a web app do notifications on ios while it is not open?

Tycho• 14 years ago

It would be a lot worse if the actor was governed by the state, because then it could be combined with: policing, ejudication, military, intellogency agency, surveillance...

philwelch2• 14 years ago

> 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.

Sure they do. You're going off to buy an Android phone, so Apple lost your money and you got the phone you wanted better. That's even better than a democratic state, where you're stuck with the same one until you can get half the population to agree with you.

SoftwareMaven2• 14 years ago

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

biafra2• 14 years ago

Is it really possible to send push notifications to apps from the cydia store?

SoftwareMaven2• 14 years ago

I'm not sure, but I would imagine not (but it would be easy to test). However, there are other alternatives at that point. Somebody may have built a clone service (Prowl appears to be a Growl-like app, for instance) or the app could have a small, always running piece that polled on occasion (not ideal for battery life reasons).

I agree the real app store would be better for many reasons.

notatoad2• 14 years ago

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.

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.

toomuchtodo• 14 years ago

Shouldn't the consumer decide what apps they want to buy instead of Apple?

CamperBob23• 14 years ago

That question has apparently been settled firmly in favor of "Apple."

Steko8• 14 years ago

The way stores work is the owner of the store decides what goods to sell in their store.

taw9• 14 years ago

Either buy Apple (and accept their model of the market) or don't. Seems fair to me.

Last Apple product I bought was a gen2 iPod.

notatoad2• 14 years ago

No, that's my point. Through careful censorship, Apple has crafted a marketplace that offends nobody. App developers find this environment valuable, that's why they are so eager to sell their content in the app store.

If you, as a customer or a developer, don't agree with apple's well documented policy here, there are alternatives you can choose. Consumers and developers have overwhelmingly said they either don't care or like the censorship though.

saurik2• 14 years ago

> “I didn’t really expect anyone to download the app if it was in the App Store,” Begley said.

> “That was the point; I don’t think people want to know when a drone strikes.”

So, what was the point, then... to waste a bunch of peoples' time?

(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 was the point 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.)

iskander• 14 years ago

For you to see the app, think "I don't want to hear about drone strikes", and then (maybe, hopefully) realize that you're actively filtering out an undeclared war being waged on your behalf.

saurik2• 14 years ago

As much as I spend my time "fighting the good fight" against Apple (and thereby am not in any way their friend or someone who agrees with many of their decisions, especially when it comes to the openness of their device), their marketplace should not be treated as someone's art project: putting products in the ecosystem whose sole goal is not to be purchased or even downloaded for free but to make someone browsing the store feel bad about themselves may be an interesting conceptual goal but it is not something I believe that anyone, much less Apple, should have to tolerate.

In a perfect world (where Apple did not have sole control), you could download it from this artist's website or even from a random alternative marketplace, but in that world this project doesn't work as it doesn't get the attention (at which point, he may as well not distribute it at all and still claim it was interesting, as it would be a nearly equivalent result); instead, this is just an artist attempting to troll Apple in a way that will cause some press, make even more people feel bad about themselves and, in addition, have some subset get angry at Apple for not letting them feel bad about themselves (which brings me back to asking after the point).

Stories like this, then, simply give the people who are trying to get these devices to be more open a bad name in the larger community, as we end up associated with all of these projects that large numbers of people find distasteful. Now, it would be one thing if the majority of the problem with Apple were things large numbers of people find objectionable or sketchy, but in fact the jailbroken ecosystem is mostly built out of entirely inoffensive things like "better multitasking", "improved address books", "download files in your browser", or even simply "replacement icons that look different".

klawed3• 14 years ago

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).

lawnchair_larry• 14 years ago

That wouldn't work at all. You'd have to be sitting there with your phone unlocked, in view of that page on Safari, watching it until your battery died (which would happen quickly).

klawed3• 14 years ago

I suppose that wouldn't work at all if you need immediate updates of drone attacks (so that you can respond in some way?) I'm questioning the need for push notifications rather than trying to propose an exact equivalent.

mark_l_watson3• 14 years ago

That really lags.

Software should be protected by free speech guarantees.

It looks like the developers just use open news data for this - nothing wrong with the doing this.

Pardon the self-plug here but I blogged today about why I hope not to buy anymore Apple products: http://blog.markwatson.com/2012/09/can-we-agree-to-stop-buyi...

cheald• 14 years ago

Software is protected by free speech guarantees. Apple isn't the US government, and therefore isn't beholden to the First Amendment. I think that Apple using its position to suppress political speech is bad, but they're certainly well within their rights to do so.

mark_l_watson3• 14 years ago

I totally agree that it is within Apple's legal rights to do what they are doing. I was just saying that it is also my right to both stop being a customer and also to try to talk other people out of buying Apple products.

gurkendoktor• 14 years ago

Apple is a gatekeeper, but so is Microsoft. Google effectively controls what users see on the web. Have you figured out how to balance these influences, or do you avoid all three of them?

In any case I find it highly ironic that one commenter on your blog post brings up Samsung as an alternative. Not quite a flying drone, but still... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SGR-A1

pooriaazimi• 14 years ago

I don't remember hearing Apple sending troops to the "developer"'s house arresting him.

Forgive my crudeness, but you're absolutely clueless about what "free speech guarantees" mean.

mark_l_watson3• 14 years ago

Let me try again: I don't like that someone can write software that is perfectly legal and to see Apple censor it. AppStore is very far from an open platform.

Writing software that interprets public data and disseminates it seems like a form of "speech" to me.

mkhalil2• 14 years ago

"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.

And that's when it happens.

A push notification from Drones+: Another drone strike in Pakistan kills 17 suspected militants.

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.

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.

"Thanks Drones+!", you say silently to yourself." -- Someones comment before deletion. To great for deletion.

mtgx• 14 years ago

When a politician or a political party does something very bad, the main problem is almost always one of awareness. Before anything, people need to know what he actually did. I bet 99% of people don't know about all the drone strikes going on.

tkahn6• 14 years ago

That's a nice thought but the only people who would download this app are the ones that already feel strongly about the drone program.

wololo• 14 years ago

how do we know we're caring about "very bad" things in the right proportions?

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_military_confli...

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_2003-2010

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents,_Ja...

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Drone_Strikes_in_Pakist...

- (if this is really only about deaths, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate)

ajscherer• 14 years ago

On one hand I think this comment makes a fair point that this isn't a very useful app. The app's creator himself admits that. He didn't expect it to be downloaded much.

On the other hand, I think this comment and Apple's rejection have both made the app creator's point very well. Not only do people want to ignore drone strikes, they actually resent the idea that other people would want to know about them. In Apple's case they state that customers would find it "objectionable." In this comment's case, the only conceivable reason anyone would want to know about drone strikes is so they could feign interest in order to feel enlightened or worldly.

This is fascinating to me. If we'd had a referendum at some point about whether to grant the U.S. military the power to kill anyone, anytime, anywhere with no checks & balances, no oversight, and no due process, according to it's judgement about what best serves the interest of national security, who do you think would've voted for it? I can't think of any significant political coalition that would've thought that was a good idea. Yet now that it is a reality, you're crazy or a traitor or insincere if you want to make it an issue.

I feel that it's related to peoples' perceived inability to do anything about it. If somebody powerful does something bad, blame the messenger for troubling your mind with it, since there is nothing you can do about somebody powerful.

mkhalil2• 14 years ago

"I feel that it's related to peoples' perceived inability to do anything about it. If somebody powerful does something bad, blame the messenger for troubling your mind with it, since there is nothing you can do about somebody powerful."

Thats deep. And true.

logn• 14 years ago

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.

jlgreco4• 14 years ago

Unless the DoD has an RSS feed somewhere that is handing out realtime data on drone strikes that the developer has somehow gotten a hold of, I cannot possibly see how this application would get information to "baddies" any faster than they could have otherwise gotten it.

drivebyacct2• 14 years ago

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.

jlgreco4• 14 years ago

It wouldn't even be so bad if it were not so repetative and inane. Criticism to the effect of "Apple shouldn't do this" always gets "They are allowed to" as a response.

Who honestly finds that insightful?

netcan• 14 years ago

This is the nature of online communities. A lot of threads are debates. A lot of them are, when reduced to the underlying issue like Apple censor apps, the same debate. If you have the same debate enough times within a short enough time period, it gets repetative and inane.

Depending on the individual case (drones+ vs celebrity arses) the discussion might be a little different "at the core" arguments are equally valid regardless of the case.

consider:

"At least when governments have this power they are theoretically accountable to publics, constitutions and ule of law"

"Apple is accountable to consumers and the market"

"If Apple started featuring an App that let you dress up Obama in racist costumes there would be crowds and boycotts and stores would stop"

"company that has absolute control on a market exerts its influence on political grounds that effectively stifle freedom of the press"

* * *

You could copy paste this in 50% of threads about app store rejections. Maybe we are done talking about app store policies. Maybe there is a benefit to repeating the exercise even if we don't get anywhere new.

Create• 14 years ago

iOS privacy app returns as a web app

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.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4460509

Apple rejects Drones+ thrice. App maker looks to Android

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