Apple now censoring dictionaries in the App Store

http://daringfireball.net/2009/08/ninjawords

by ajg1977 • 17 years ago

327 80 17 years ago

ajg1977• 17 years ago

I love the fact that Apple required it be censored because if they typed in an obscene word, they saw an obscene word...

Priceless.

Mintz2• 17 years ago

Then it sounds like Apple should review some of their own apps, like text messaging.

ujjwalg• 17 years ago

wow!! This is just plain simple ridiculous. I have been using a dictionary since I was 10. I dont even know that one can buy censored dictionaries.

Apple needs to do something really quick before things go out of their hand.

po2• 17 years ago

This is really getting ridiculous.

I think the hardest part to understand is that we all know that Jobs will come down on people who make mistakes with furious anger. He will protect those he agrees with even in the face of public outrage. We can also assume that Jobs is aware of what the App store reviewers are doing. Knowing all of this, we can only assume that they are doing what they do with his blessing.

That's the thing I can't reconcile. I keep waiting for an explanation, but I'm thinking its going to be a while.

arfrank• 17 years ago

This is something that I too keep on thinking about every time another incident happens. The best I have come up with is that SJ is not in control of this. It may have become bigger than he could totally control while he was away from the company. Who is to say he is not fuming each time one of these stories comes around and that they are working on a change(Apple has screwed up on the iPhone before and took their time fixing that).

Also I also think he nailed it with the last line in the story-telling sense.

"Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to purchase a censored dictionary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day."

po2• 17 years ago

I can't picture Steve fuming about it. I can see him kicking doors in and fixing it. But he's (aparently) not. That's the thing: either Steve lost control of his baby or he lost his sense of morals. Both are disturbing to me.

Titanous• 17 years ago

What's interesting is that the Dictionary.com app (free) contains every single word mentioned as "objectionable content" and it's rated 4+. Gotta love the consistency.

derefr• 17 years ago

I think the best possible change to the App Store (aside from complete transparency) would be a button in the submission queue labelled "resubmit under different reviewer." Every time it was pressed, the reviewer who had rejected the app would be banned from reviewing it again; thus, we'd be able to get over humps like thirty dictionary apps being accepted and one rejected, or the same app being accepted and then rejected later in an update for things it has contained since the original version. The number of bannings a reviewer collected would be a very helpful metric for Apple come review-time. Of course, if you ended up banning the entire review staff from looking at your app, it's not going anywhere (thus avoiding people bullying the "market" for reviewers into only ever accepting apps. If you're unilaterally rejected, all the reviewer-bannings on your app are lifted—and thus no longer count in the HR process—and you're the one who gets banned instead.)

elai• 17 years ago

That defeats the point, since the guys who accept all apps will get a score of zero, while not doing their main job description.

TJensen• 17 years ago

That, in my mind, is the most annoying thing about it. I don't care what the rules are (within reason), but make sure we know what they are and apply them consistently.

blhack2• 17 years ago

Not to be the bearer of bad news here, guys, but I very much doubt that this is going to do much to slow apple down.

Their core user base for the iPhone seems to be not geeks, but teenage girls. Even if it WAS just geeks, we make up a minuscule percentage of the population. Chances are that if I told one of my sisters, or my mother (who all have iPhones) about this, they would roll their eyes a bit, add an entry or two to the "brother is a conspiracy nut" column, and point me to the latest "omg cute!" app that they downloaded.

The iPhone and the appstore are not going anywhere. If developers like us stop building things for it, people who value cash more than they value principles will take our place.

As much as it sucks, this is the world that we live in.

jrockway• 17 years ago

"Apple, the choice of dumb people."

It worked for Wal-Mart.

dejb2• 17 years ago

What are you talking about? Just 6 months ago this place was so thick with iPhone devotees you couldn't swing a metaphorical light sabre app without hitting one. I don't think think there are too many 'cutesy type' teenage girls on HN (although it would explain some things).

Unfortunately geekdom was just as taken in as everybody else - perhaps more so and they were disproportionately responsible for it's rapid growth. Geeks are more likely to

- be early apoptors

- blog, tweet, talk about gadgets

- be believed by non geeks when it comes to technical areas and products

Most importantly they are the ones who develop the software that makes the platform actually useful. Without geeks there's no 'App for that'.

This gives them (us) substantial influence. How to you think Firefox gain it's market share. Of course now that the iPhone has momentum they aren't so dependant on the approval of geeks. But over time if they don't attract developers and if they keep removing software then the platform will stagnate. Combine that with geeks putting their weight behind another platform and change could be effected fairly quickly.

ryanwaggoner• 17 years ago

It's true that geeks are early adopters, but that doesn't mean that every popular technology product is due to geeks giving their stamp of approval. The iPhone has passed the point where geeks opinions matter for much...marketing and the fact that everyone has the iPhone now means that most people see it as a cool tech device, not as something they should ask their geek friend for advice on.

blhack2• 17 years ago

During the initial phases of adoption, yes, you are absolutely correct. Geeks provide a sort of "buffer" for the rest of the public; we test things and report on what is the best.

The iPhone has reached a point where it isn't going to matter what we say anymore. Look at windows, how long have we all been screaming from the rooftops that it is garbage? How much affect has it had? Some, maybe, sure...but people look at their computers, realize that they can more-or-less get what they need done done, and then they forget about it and go on with their lives.

People are NOT going to give up the iPhone on some silly ideological ground. Yes, this pisses me off, no I won't be buying an iPhone, yes apple is moving further and further away from something that I want, but NONE of this matters to my mom.

quizbiz• 17 years ago

There are tons of teenage girls with macbooks and yet none of them have a censored dictionary.dmg

mooted• 17 years ago

What if the government wanted all dictionaries to be curse-word-free? Will the publishing companies involved just sit back and accept the move as " this is the world that we live in"?

dtf• 17 years ago

I have a feeling they would. Wiktionary and the like probably wouldn't - they don't have a profit motive and are more concerned about universal rights and access to information.

CWuestefeld• 17 years ago

I don't see how this question is relevant.

As this thread makes clear, there are ample other platforms if we dislike Apple's policies. Anyone is free to purchase, or develop for, Android or Windows Mobile or RIM.

Government regulation is a whole other animal, because they ensure that there cannot be any alternative to compete and let the best idea win. That's the problem with government action, but that's also a different discussion.

tjmc• 17 years ago

I think that's a little defeatist. Apple caved when it came to developing full blown apps for the iPhone due to the outcry from developers. Remember, they originally only wanted to allow Safari based development.

I'd love to see some creative, coordinated protest from the iPhone developer community. The best conference protest I can remember was when indigenous Australians stood up and turned their backs on our former Prime Minister John Howard. Imagine if that happened at Apple's WWDC, it would send a powerful and embarrassing message.

Apple is becoming increasingly belligerent and rely on the fanatical loyalty of their developers to simply keep taking it. At some point it's time to take your hand off the stove.

bjelkeman-again• 17 years ago

"Apple caved when it came to developing full blown apps for the iPhone due to the outcry from developers. Remember, they originally only wanted to allow Safari based development."

I personally don't think that this is true. I don't think they did develop the full SDK for the iPhone from the point when the reaction to "Safari only apps" was bad. They just were not finished with the SDK. Apple does this a lot. They only release stuff which is reasonably ready to be released. A half-assed release of the SDK would have been worse than a late SDK IMHO.

yason2• 17 years ago

Geeks write the cool applications. Geeks who love their iPhone.

Remove that love and you're left with a mobile consumer market as full of ingenuity as the business of custom-tailoring b2b enterprise applications.

jimbokun• 17 years ago

"Their core user base for the iPhone seems to be not geeks, but teenage girls."

I tend to think of the core Apple demographic heavily overlapping the Daily Show with John Stewart demographic. And can you imagine how much fun Stewart could have with them, and how quickly Apple could go from the hip and cool tech company to the uncool, busy body, Sarah Palin censoring books in Alaska libraries company?

BigZaphod• 17 years ago

Apple is dammed if they do, dammed if they don't at this point. Do they even have a way out? If they open it up entirely, people will bitch about how it should have been that way from the start and now we can't trust them to not close it down again later, etc. If they close it down more, we get more of the same bitching which has been building for months now. If they finally settle on a solid list of rules and restrictions and actually abide by them, people will tear those rules apart for all manner of reason, too. :-/

RyanMcGreal2• 17 years ago

Sorry, but Apple made their bed. They don't get my sympathy just because they've painted themselves into a corner.

In any case, there's a lot to be said for, "You know, our App Store approval model just doesn't work, so we're abandoning it. From now on, it's open and transparent all the way."

idlewords• 17 years ago

So from this we can deduce that their bed is in the corner?

jseifer• 17 years ago

I'm waiting for them to reject a paint/drawing app of some sort for "illicit content" after an app store reviewer draws an inappropriate picture.

mquander• 17 years ago

I guess it goes without saying what rating the "black screen that makes your phone like a mirror" app should get.

yan• 17 years ago

This reminds me of a twitter update Wil Shipley[1] sent recently:

  "I feel like Apple should rate their new iDisk-access app 
   for iPhone "17+," since my iDisk is full of porn. It's 
   only fair."

http://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/2921713963

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wil_Shipley

awolf• 17 years ago

This is [REDACTED].

alexitosrv• 17 years ago

ha ha ha xD

At least HN is (and hopefully it will remain) free of stupid Apple censorship.

jexe2• 17 years ago

I've got a language translation dictionary in the app store. When I tried to get an important 3.0 bugfix through, I was rejected by the same logic, until I changed the rating to 17+. Crazy thing is, you can set your app rating to "Frequent/intense profanity or crude humor", and it'll just bump the rating to 12+. Still unacceptable to Apple (presumably, at least. I asked the review team if this would be suitable, but of course heard nothing back).

So my dictionary now appears to have "Frequent/intense sexual content or nudity" because the review team tried to translate bad words.

In a moment of frustration, sent a sarcastic quip to Apple's review team about not allowing dictionaries to minors, and I'm left wondering if that knocked me into the slow queue - because it took well over a month to finally get the update approved.

smokey_the_bear2• 17 years ago

No kidding. My app also features "Frequent/intense sexual content or nudity" because it displays information from wikipedia about parks nearby. And any third party content is 17+

jexe2• 17 years ago

All that this really doing is diluting their own censorship rules until they're meaningless. It's as if every movie featuring actors showing their legs above the knees was rated R.

luckyland• 17 years ago

"The app store sucks. Look it up!"

Oompa• 17 years ago

This sucks, but the application is fantastic. If anyone has been waiting for a good dictionary app for the iPhone, this one is fantastic.

KC8ZKF• 17 years ago

To any of you who are parents, how fined grained are the parental controls on iPhone? If I want my child to have Project Gutenberg and a dictionary in his pocket, do I then allow him to install any NC-17 application?

paulbaumgart2• 17 years ago

You can set a maximum "level of naughtiness":

  Don't Allow Apps
  4+
  9+
  12+
  17+
  Allow All Apps

So, the short answer to your second question is "yes". Pretty stupid, huh?

philc• 17 years ago

I'm one of the developers for Ninjawords. Thanks everyone for sharing in our frustration. I thought this was a bit ridiculous as we were going back and forth with Apple, but I didn't know it would cause such public outrage. I guess Apple is really striking a nerve recently in exercising their totalitarian App Store powers. I hope they're interested in rectifying the developer experience, because it really is a great device to build software for. It's just that months of rejection over an innocuous educational utility tends to crush any excitement, you know?

tghw• 17 years ago

I bought Ninjawords after reading the description and I just wanted to say that shit is fucking awesome!

Those pussies at Apple don't realize how badly they've screwed this up. Those cocksuckers need pull their motherfucking heads out of their motherfucking asses, unbunch the panties in their snatch, and start treating their users and developers with the respect they deserve.

Fucking shit pisses me off.

gamache• 17 years ago

This does not bode well for Hacker News.ipa...

jstevens85• 17 years ago

Could you clarify a point? According to this [comment](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743622), profanities in a dictionary are fine as long as the app is submitted with a 17+ rating. Wouldn't this also be true for Ninjawords?

paulbaumgart2• 17 years ago

What's the point of the rating system if even dictionaries have to be rated 17+?

Wasn't the idea to allow finer-grained control over the content allowed on a given iPod/iPhone than was possible previously?

Why can't they allow filtering over the sub-categories rather than just the broad labels? There's a world of difference between "obscene" words and graphic pornography.

yason2• 17 years ago

I first thought Android wouldn't be more than a concept platform at least for a next few years but I must say, I'm stunned.

Apple is working really, really hard to crank up the market pressure and to make Android a very lucrative, unrestricted cross-device choice of platform for all those totally pissed off by iPhone's AppStore.

I wonder what it's like having a day NOT seeing anyone blog a rant about Apple and AppStore.

Derrek• 17 years ago

Yeah, it's almost like Apple is trying to advertise FOR the Android market.

I've toyed with the idea of developing iPhone apps. But after these last few weeks, I'd be much more inclined to learn the Android API. Sure, the iPhone has a larger user-base right now, but there are dozens of Android handsets scheduled to be released in 2010.

lallysingh• 17 years ago

Eric: Don't worry Steve, I'll take care of the app-store review process for you. We'll make sure it's a clean, safe place for every kind of customer. (muahahahahah)

iron_ball• 17 years ago

all those totally pissed off by iPhone's AppStore

All those developers.

I wonder what it's like having a day NOT seeing anyone blog a rant about Apple and AppStore.

It's like spending a day not reading blogs about software development.

javanix• 17 years ago

Its pissing off the developers - not the vast majority of Apple's customers.

Like it or not, Apple's popularity has made the iBrand fairly self-sufficient by now, and its going to take a lot more than a couple of unjustly-pulled apps to derail that train off the pop-culture tracks.

0wned• 17 years ago

Kill your application devs and you kill your device. A point not lost on Microsoft.

spoondan• 17 years ago

Repeat after me: 2009 has been a complete disaster for the iPhone.

Nothing has gone right. Even the new hardware and OS launches, which should have been all good news, were marred by bad PR. So far, all of these missteps haven't seriously hurt the bottom line. But, if Apple stays on this trajectory, isn't it only a matter of time?

jsz0• 17 years ago

They've sold more iPhones in 2009 than the previous 2 years combined and the year isn't even over yet. Something has gone very right.

gojomo• 17 years ago

Can Jobs apologize like Bezos did?

pchristensen2• 17 years ago

"A-po-lo-gi-ze? Here, have an apple you little ape" - Steve Jobs using his mental dictionary

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

Reminds me of the old 'if your car was designed by a computer company' entry for Apple: You get in your car to drive to the store, but it takes you to church instead.

dabeeeenster• 17 years ago

I like the way they missed the word "Cunt" when developing the app. Doh!

Quarrelsome2• 17 years ago

I guess the devs were just too pure of mind to consider such words. :D

pmorici• 17 years ago

The more I read about the app store the more it looks like a classic bureaucracy. I mean what kind of people do you expect Apple has hired to "approve" all of these apps? I'll give you a hit it isn't some ace computer scientist with a degree from an Ivy league school. I have a hard time believing this is some conspiracy on the part of Apple the company so much as it is a few low level employees playing the CYA game.

adamc• 17 years ago

This is a great story. Just reading it made me think of "Lucky Jim", not for the details but for the general level of absurdity. Somehow Apple has gotten out of touch with this particular market.

pchristensen2• 17 years ago

"Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to purchase a censored dictionary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day."

BjornW• 17 years ago

I understand the frustration of the developers of Ninja Words, but I do not understand why we keep having these Apple Store rejected app stories on HN.

If Apple is behaving like a jerk, why invest any energy in them? AFAIK there are other interesting developing platforms with interesting hardware. The iPhone might have a nice userbase, but I presume this will not matter in the end since most phones seem to head into the direction of being complete pc's anyway, why bother with a mobile 'desktop' application as new mobile browsers are going to be supporting more and more of the common desktop pc browsers features?

I mean - excuse my ignorance - , but why would a developer voluntarily deal with the ongoing Apple App store dictatorship? Without a healthy ecosystem of applications the iPhone is dead in the water. As is the current silo approach embraced by Apple. Why would a developer invest any energy into their doomed silo scheme?

IMHO let Apple reject applications as much as they want, history has learned us that the most open system will prevail (Video2000 Vs VHS for example) and my bet is on the Web and open OSses like Android, Linux and perhaps Symbian (if the ever get serious about going FLOSS).

lutorm• 17 years ago

How are you supposed to make an informed decision about whether developing for the iphone is worth it unless you have good data on rejections?

durin423• 17 years ago

The point as I see it is to get developers moving away from the platform, and buying other phones because there is no app-store-draconianism and saying that when they get the phone. Voting with dollars and making it painfully clear why the decision was made is hugely important.

  history has learned us that the most open system will prevail

Really? So Linux on the desktop is destroying Mac OS X and Windows? Honestly, I know of 2 developers (yes, developers) that actually seriously are Linux full-time. The rest are on OS X, because it's a better system as a whole. They don't care about the openness of the underlying platform as long as it isn't managed like a POW camp.

The truth is that the iPhone would be a dream to develop for were it not for the draconian app store processes. I love Cocoa, and UIKit (aka Cocoa Touch) is equally clean to work with.

Also, there's no real solid indication as yet that Android is going to be worlds better, ditto for the Pre. We're all hopeful, especially given the heavy OSS roots of those platforms, but in the end they could have similar dumb restrictions on the hardware from the carriers and we'd end up equally screwed.

dpapathanasiou• 17 years ago

I went through the same thing with my Japanese dictionary app (http://banrai.com/nihongo.html).

For the initial rating, I said it had no bad language, sex, or violence.

It got rejected for language (apparently, the first the reviewers do is try to use four-letter words).

So I changed the rating to "mild/infrequent" and it got rejected again.

Here's part of what I wrote to them after the second rejection:

"I'm not sure how to respond to your comment that the rating is inappropriate.

"Nihongo" is a Japanese dictionary.

As such, it contains some profanity, sexual content, etc. but the bulk of the content is not in that category."

That got no reply from Apple, so I went back, used the strongest possible rating (like Ninja Words, it's now rated 17+).

More than a month after it was first posted, it was approved for sale.

Mintz2• 17 years ago

I knew if I read this article, my blood would boil like it does with every other App Store article that's been coming out lately. Yet I read it anyway, and I can only ask:

How long will Apple get away with this?

oliverkofoed• 17 years ago

I'm not a lawyer... But, isn't it a legal issue?

My guess would be that the reason they're acting like they are, is that they have to strictly enforce the rules as they are written.

If they make exceptions or even approve an app that doesn't conform 100%; could that not later be used as a prior art opening up all sorts of discussions/legal-nastyness?

If they rephrased the rules such that they could use their own best judgement on a case-by-case basis, the discussions would just be bigger when one app gets approved and another one doesn't.

At least this way, it should be fairly clear as an app developer whether your app will get approved or not: If they can find anything "bad" in it, it won't.

danbmil992• 17 years ago

"I'm not a lawyer... "

Please, let's keep it that way. Their process is random, it conforms 100% to rapid cycling between capricious fascism and complete lack of attention. What they are doing seems almost designed to piss off the maximum number of developers, thus vastly increasing the probability of lawsuits and bad press.

Face it people, Apple is just completely screwing up. Get over it, they're human like everyone else.

heycarsten• 17 years ago

Strip employees of all decision making and reasoning because that stuff is expensive. Create a protocol that they must follow, how could it possibly fail?

danbmil992• 17 years ago

This whole nonsense bodes ill for Apple after Steve. In fact, I suspect it's a foreshadowing of how fucked up Apple will be if he ever leaves the company. Apple+Jobs is a bit like North Korea (though more successful) -- it's whole structure is built around a single personality. There seems to be no cultural ability to properly delegate authority.

If Steve had been full throttle over the last year, he would have personally vetted the first 500 apps, and carefully trained a couple lackeys to predict his innate reaction so well that they could proxy for him for 90% of the submissions (those from unknowns). Steve would have personally handled the 5 or 10% from developers deemed important enough to not completely piss off. This is how he's run the company since his return (and probably how he ran it in the first place).

In my experience negotiating with Apple, it was like talking to the staff of a very famous and influential person, rather than talking to people at a company with a normal distribution of responsibility. Everyone could give you an opinion or best guess about what might transpire, but absolutely nothing could be decided one way or another without the direct involvement of Steve.

I think they're in for a very rough period if/when Steve leaves. Obviously the app store has fallen off his radar or we wouldn't be seeing this kind of bullshit. It's all a factor of his personal bandwidth, which has obviously been impacted by his health.

Apple now censoring dictionaries in the App Store

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