Initially we received a rejection letter from the App Store review team, saying that the app used bandwidth that was demanding on the cell network that was excessive “in Apple’s reasonable judgment.” With a 128kbps mp3 stream, I found this curious as I have used several streaming radio apps that connect to 128kbps streams, including the excellent WFMU app, but also the much higher profile AOL Radio app.

Some google searching revealed this helpful article on StackOverflow wherein the writer related being told verbally by App Store personnel that one megabyte per minute was the maximum allowed. I did some quick math on the calculator and it seemed that my app should be receiving 960KB/minute, so I should be good.  But following the StackOverflow poster’s advice related from Apple staff, I shut off all other notifications and used the Settings app>General>Usage  to reset the statistics and then track the app for 5 minutes. For some reason the app came in as receiving 5.4MB over 5 minutes, which means I was around 10% over the limit.

I am not sure if other 128kbps streams have this issue, or there’s mysterious overhead lurking in mine, but I had planned to knock down the quality to 96k anyway as 128k over 3G still has too many dropouts.

I wrote Apple an email back explaining that it was not an app issue but a stream issue, and I could easily knock the stream down a notch. Which I did, and I got an email saying the status of the app had been changed to “Pending” again. A couple days later, a very congenial Apple developer relations person called me and confirmed the rumor that the limit was indeed 1MB per minute. I said that I had already compressed the stream further and she said they’d rerun the metrics.

It was all very well handled, and to my satisfaction… but the question remains, if the limit for data transfer is a hard number (1MB/min) then why isn’t that written in the developer agreement? Why do they only communicate the details of the rules verbally after the fact? As with the no satire rule, it would would be nice to know what the specifics are in advance.

Backporch Revolution is an artist-run collective and netlabel based in New Orleans that specializes in releasing experimental electronic works by local musicians. The website is backporchrevolution.com

Regular readers will remember that Juggleware’s own app Freedom Time was actually the test case of this unwritten and up-til-then unknown policy, which had not been explicitly defined beyond the word “defamatory” briefly appearing.  For a timeline of other apps (there are at least 16 now) that have been banned for this silly charge, see this blog:

Apple’s Policy on Satire: 16 Apps Rejected for “Ridiculing Public Figures” [Cloud Four]

If there was an app rejected before September 2008 for political satire, we’d like to hear about it; please post in the comments below.

The interesting thing about the Mark Fiore case is that Apple has apparently reconsidered their rejection, and asked Fiore to resubmit his app. That’s great news, but does it really mean Apple is finally reconsidering their rather draconian policy? Or are they just trying to avoid the bad publicity that’s likely to escalate when the content is associated with the winner of a Pulitzer? I guess we’ll have to wait till the next rejection (or approval) to find out.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball makes the point that what’s most frustrating to developers is the grey area of ill-defined rules. Developers trying to navigate App Store policy plays out like trying to divine the will of a god, who is without a doubt omnipotent, but  rarely seems omniscient, and appears to mortals as vindictive and capricious at times. Or perhaps a closer amalgam could be a Kafka-esque bureaucracy, layers of obscure rules unseen by citizens, wheels moving cruelly behind the scenes towards some irreversible and arbitrary concept justice so thickly wrapped in red tape as to be impenetrable?

But back to the heart of it, what’s really so awful about demeaning public figures? Most of them need a swift kick in the ass. If it’s done in a way that’s not illegal or obscene,  that threatens violence or makes a patently untrue claim, then why the censorship? One possible answer might be that that’s it’s just wide cover for one public figure who is sacrosanct in the Apple canon, in which case I would like to suggest the following amendment to the satire rule:  No application may include images, text, or sound that demeans Steven P. Jobs.

At least that way we could still satirize everything else under the sun, and the rule would kind of be a parody of itself.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125561844

You can also read more from Mr Zittrain on the subject in this piece from the Financial Times.

Pocket Troll 1.0

For more info, go here: http://www.juggleware.com/iphone/pocket_troll/

Thanks Jason, I am glad that someone gets the real issue, and I won’t even take issue with “simple, stupid”:

Can you imagine political discourse of any significance that doesn’t include demeaning or attacking political figures? Like it or not, that’s part of the exchange of ideas that form a democracy.

This policy essentially bans any editorial cartoons—cartoons that have been part of America’s history since its inception….

Freedom of speech is easy to defend when the speech is popular, but the real test comes when you have to defend unpopular speech or things that you don’t agree with.

In Fall 2008, George Bush had the worst approval ratings since Nixon. At a time in which we had one of the most unpopular Presidents in American history, Apple didn’t have the courage to approve a simple, stupid application like Freedom Time.

What is the likelihood that Apple would approve a truly controversial and unpopular application during a time when popular opinion makes it difficult to stand up for what’s right?

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/apple-answers-fcc-questions/

Of course the FCC is primarily interested in its rejection of big, important apps like Google Voice, and not indie developer apps, so Apple was able to gloss over its political censorship of apps like Freedom Time (See section 5, above), and not even include any rejected political content app in its list of “representative applications.”

To me, rejecting an app for speech reasons is much worse than for technological competition reasons, but maybe that’s because I am someone who cares about the first Amendment, something that has been shoved to the back of the bus while greasing the wheels of the free market machine.

Thanks to Brad at Bent Media for pointing me to this excellent essay by Joe Hewitt demanding the end of the App Store approval process as we know it.

But that hasn’t stopped others from trying ideas that are beyond the pale, and some that are so truly tasteless, that our little attempted joke at the expense of the outgoing president of the US seems really sterile by comparison.

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the “Baby Shaker” app controversy. It got the press scrambling to look at Apple’s app approval stories once more and, after months of assuming the whole thing had been relegated to its proper place as a footnote in the appendix of the Apple history books, I got contacted by ABC News and the Wall Street Journal over Apple’s rejection of Freedom Time.

• Banned by Apple: 9 iPhone App Rejects – ABC News (page 5)
• Apple’s Gatekeeper Role Draws Scrutiny – WSJ.com

All very exciting, I suppose, except that the reporters never seem to get the gist of what I was trying to say, which was this:

If Apple makes itself the gatekeeper, it is actually causing itself the problems it’s trying to avoid. By rejecting an app that makes fun of Bush, but accepting one that lets you kill babies, it implies that it disapproves of one and approves of the other. If someone had made this application for Windows, Mac OS X, or any other desktop system, no one would accuse Microsoft, Apple or Linux for not building an OS that prevents Baby Shaker applications from being installed. Apple made both a whole lot more work and a whole lot more controversy for itself by insisting on manually gatekeeping for every single app that goes in the store.

Juggleware’s debut iPhone app, Freedom Time, as many of you so cleverly noticed, was an application with a time-specific usage. Funny, it just happened to coincide with the inauguration of President Obama.

For those of you who were lucky enough to get the banned iPhone app, or even bothered to look at the Flash version on the site, you’ll see that the time began to move forward at the precise instant^* of the swearing in of President Obama at the inauguration, and the text end of an error changed to time to clear some brush!

So it’s a kind of forced obsolescence, but it’s still functional for those who wish to count the days, hours, minutes and seconds since the Bush regime, it’s still working. And in all humility, we were the first to pat ourselves on the back for the nifty symbolism of time moving forward from that moment on.

We’re not giving away any more copies of the app however. We’re moving onward and upward!

In that respect, we hope to have some nifty games for the iPhone in 2009. Keep checking back for news on the latest.

* actually, the precise scheduled moment; he was sworn in a few minutes late and the clock actually ran out during Yo Yo Ma’s cello introduction.

Once every 5 years or so, it snows in New Orleans