Tweetie 1.3 Rejection and Cautious Comparisons

Tweetie was wronged!

Yesterday's uproar about Apple's rejection of the Tweetie 1.3 update from the App Store was a good example of the community's general frustration with Apple's opaque and arbitrary decision-making. But, it's also an example of the community's lack of caution when arguing their case. According to the Apple iPhone SDK Agreement:

3.3.12 Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.

Okay, sounds fair right? Sort of... but the latest Tweetie application was rejected because of "obscene material" (in this case dirty words) in the Trends portion of the application. This is a screen which shows you the most frequently-used words on Twitter in the recent past.

Trends is a wonderful feature which allows us to see what's hot in the world right now, what news is burbling up to the surface by being tweeted and retweeted a lot. Frequently, this is news of current events that reach Twitter users long before any other news media.

Does the Tweetie application "contain any obscene" material if the only obscene material is UGC (user-generated content)?  I certainly don't think so, and neither did most of the iPhone user community.

But the critics were wrong, too, just a bit...

Now, I think we all agree that Apple is not being clear enough about their standards or their process. After this, we might all agree they don't seem clear internally, either. Although we would hope these decisions aren't made with no thought whatsoever.

However, the loudest and quickest critics often give too little consideration in turn.

Many detractors compared this to rejecting a web browser because someone could navigate to a page containing obscene material, an email client because your friends and spammers might have filthy mouths, and an RSS reader, should you have a taste for off-color bloggers.

Personally, I'm not sure any of these comparisons are perfect. They're not bad, but there is a difference: in order to view obscenities, you must tell these tools to show you something obscene.

There is no screen that you can use in Safari, for example, that could show porn, curse words, or make fart sounds at you before you give it an address. You either have to type something first or click a link in another application in order to do that.

On the other hand, Tweetie presents community-developed content on its Trends screen, which means you can get to obscenities without ever telling Tweetie where to take you. Simply click on Tweetie, click on Trends, and be aghast at the horrible curse words floating through Twitterspace. Even an RSS Reader requires you to choose your RSS feeds, and your Mail application is obviously subject to your choices of friends and spam filters. But Tweetie will show you curse words without you making any choice but to use Tweetie.

Is there a more reasonable comparison?

Perhaps a more apt metaphor would be a video game that shares high scores among users. Why do you suppose old arcade games only gave us three letters? You can't spell a four-letter word with only three letters!

With our hypothetical modern game, if a user has an obscene username, and is really good, you could see obscenities without doing anything but firing up the game and clicking "High Scores". Should we, therefore, restrict all video games from having a high scores screen?

Or how about the YouTube application? This is one of Apple's own apps, but it's quite possible that the "Most Recent" page could show you homemade pornography (it's happened to me) before YouTube takes it down. After all, somebody has to be the first to flag it!

So what?  Where are you going with all of this?

I really don't know whether Apple's decision-makers considered the browser metaphor or just clicked through the screens, saw !$#$%, and clicked Deny. I suspect the latter, given the explosion of apps in recent months.  If I'm right, this is decision-making process is broken, or at least insufficient. But should it really be overruled by a jury of hasty bloggers?

Though the results are sound, and the reasons for the outrage were valid, the arguments used make me a little nervous. This is not an extreme example, but, left unchecked, it could be the beginning of a trend.  Over time, as Apple realizes that this community of outraged iPhone owners is hasty and emotional, then they will listen less and less.

If we want App Store Reform, I can't help but think we owe it to the accused to think things through when showing them the error of their ways.  Let's do more due diligence than they do, not less.  Let's make a strong enough argument that they might consider one day changing from a benevolent dictatorship to a democracy. Okay, that's the end of my rant - thanks for listenin'!