According to Wired, Apple VP and head of App Store process Phillip Shoemaker sells his own fart apps, including a pee app, and why wouldn’t he? It’s a perfectly legitimate product. For some reason, he chose to sever the links that made this revelation possible shortly after the Wired piece, which seems a bit more odd. Apple PR issued a statement, which I will attempt to de-PR-speak in situ.
Phillip’s apps were written, submitted and approved before he became an Apple employee.
At Apple, we don’t pee on our hands.
His experience and perspective as a developer is one of the valuable things he brings to Apple’s developer relations team.
Yeah, Phil’s our token fart guy.
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.
Our platform is so open and our approval process so fair and transparent, we don’t even need to use it.
Seriously, though; what? Even if you subscribe to the idea of curation as the ultimate avenue, where’s the need to block people? If objectivity played any part, self-serving motives would be void. Unless it doesn’t, and writing the rules down and following them blindly would expose your thirst for control at the cost of actual utility and usefulness.
Or unless the whole concept is morally bankrupt and doesn’t actually fly anyway; it just happens to work acceptably because success hides problems, and because you can continue to hire Ministry of Truth personell until the problem seems to go away because now everyone’s complaining in unison instead of one and one on queue, which seems like a bigger story.
Oh, I see, it’s because of the Android App Market and its one lack of oversight. That’s why we can’t have shiny things, by which I mean adult treatment. Also, I heard someone stuffed a ballot once. This democracy thing obviously doesn’t work, wanna go via feudalism or straight to a totalitarian military state?
It grates.
And for what it’s worth, I believe that if someone wants to have a black swastika in their phone, then they should be able to, just as they should if they wanted to have anything else in there. Thoughtcrime is a concept that’s incompatible with a functioning democracy that has sane laws and a working judicial system. By all means, stop it when it crosses over into illegality. Listing it in a repository which forbids it qualifies; espousing the horrible opinions that are usually connected with it easily qualifies, and so on.
By Jesper · 2010.08.18 21:29
On the other hand, a shop isn’t obliged to stock swastikas because you want to sell them. A shop is not a democracy, it’s a business. If they don’t want to stock anything that is coloured mauve, that’s their right.
The problem is that the App store is the only (legit) sales route – but I think that problem will sort itself out – eventually the iOS App market will be large enough that Apple won’t be able to claim ‘there are competing platforms’ – it’s going to be a significant market in it’s own right.
And the Android market is nacked too, if you’re a developer who wants to make money selling ad-free apps – you’re blocked from selling in more countries than iTMS, and you’re blocked from participating in even more.
There is no real unregulated marketplace.
By JulesLt · 2010.08.18 22:38
“The problem is that the App store is the only (legit) sales route – but I think that problem will sort itself out – eventually the iOS App market will be large enough that Apple won’t be able to claim ‘there are competing platforms’ – it’s going to be a significant market in it’s own right.”
In the long run, it’ll sort itself out. But Keynes said something about the long run…
iOS is not in on a track to be a monopoly, and short of that, there is nothing to keep Cupertino from behaving as they currently behave. I’m just hoping there is a decent interval before it infects OS X.
But hey, it’s a helluva game console. Too bad it’s not what we want, but again, it’s a helluva game console.
By Chucky · 2010.08.18 23:17
JulesLt: Of course not. I never made that claim. Read what I wrote again.
By Jesper · 2010.08.18 23:35
I hear your overall complaint about App Store oversight, but I think you’re misconstruing Apple’s pull quotes there a bit. It’s my understanding that Apple employees’ employment agreements forbid them from publishing apps, for free or for pay, on the App Store. It’s also my understanding that one corner of that policy is that if you had an app up before you started working at Apple, that app can stay up, however once working for Apple, you’re not even allowed to make bug fix releases; No app store activity allowed at all while working for Apple.
Your response of, “Our platform is so open and our approval process so fair and transparent, we don’t even need to use it.”, seems to indicate that you think Apple employees are getting some sort of preferential treatment in App Store approval. The reality is quite the opposite.
By Jour · 2010.08.19 13:41
Jour: Nope; no matter what you find that it indicates, I think they’re getting a raw end of the deal and that it’s a curious policy. Election officials can still vote. The limitation suggests a system that’s less than fair.
I’ve gotten word from multiple sources that it may be a case of too many Apple programmers breaking off to run startups. This is the same company that fears poaching, so it certainly rings true. But it doesn’t excuse the policy in that it highlights the absurdity of the whole operation. No one at Google or HTC or Motorola are barred from writing Android apps and selling them (except for abysmal country coverage), and Microsoft seems to think they’ll get many of their Windows Phone 7 apps from inside the campus (which might well be true, for different reasons).
I understood your entire first paragraph exactly as you wrote it. There’s no disagreement between us here. I just think it’s awful.
By Jesper · 2010.08.19 20:20