App Store approvals & rejections

With only a few weeks until the iPad's April 3rd launch, Apple is apparently making "last-minute" changes to its upcoming iBookstore along with certifying apps to run on the iPad. Per Forbes, San Francisco-based Busted Loop is said to have learned about the iBookstore categories while working on a project designed to make it easier for the public to find apps. The category infomation comes from data supplied to Apple enterprise partners.

When Apple banned sexual content from the App Store, there were a lot of mixed opinoins from people. A lot of apps were banned in the process, and it left a lot of people wondering what Apple's motives were for doing so. Four days after the chance in policy, Apple's Phil Schiller is explaining their decision to make the change.

In a major revision of App Store policy, Apple has effectively banned sexually explicit content from the App Store. According to a letter received by Jon Atherton, developer of an application called Wobble iBoobs (I bet you can't guess what it does...), Apple has removed his app from the App Store because they "have decided to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store, which includes [his] application."

The most talked about issue developers have with the App Store has been the long app approval times, but the new year seems to have brought significantly shortened wait times. Several developers have corroborated that Apple's turnaround has greatly improved and are now measuring the time it takes in hours and days instead of weeks and months.

The first time we noticed this was when Facebook released a bug update to Facebook for iPhone in under 24 hours. We initially thought that it was due to special treatment for Facebook, but many of your comments suggested that other apps were being approved just as fast.

Apple has gotten a lot of guff (including from us) for giving developers headaches and laying down the law on certain things that don't always make sense or make us happy iPhone users, but this can be a good thing if the developer happens to be a bad guy trying to steal information or rip you off. Google opted for the polar opposite approval policy, leaving their Android Market wide open for all developers. The danger there is that you run the risk of allowing downright nasty malicious apps in and let people download them, which is exactly what has happened.

As many of you may know, Facebook released a much-anticipated update [App Store, Free] for its iPhone app yesterday which included two major new features; push notifications and the ability to sync your iPhone contacts with Facebook. Now because many of my contacts don't have photos, I turned on sync and toggled the "replace photos" option to off. Then disaster struck — well, kind of.

Long story short, the app replaced all of my contacts' photos without regard for that toggle switch. So to address the issue, Facebook released an update early this morning and everything works great now. But since when could developers release app updates in under 24 hours?

Back in August 2008, Qik announced that they had begun publicly beta testing their Qik streaming application for the iPhone. It worked well, but never showed up on the App Store due to submission restrictions. Now, nearly a year later, TechCrunch is reporting that Ustream's streaming app has finally been approved for the iPhone. The Ustream Live Broadcaster [App Store] lets you stream live video to Ustream over 3G/WiFi using the iPhone 3G & 3GS.

Many of you will remember that Steve Jobs allegedly approved the first live video streaming app last week. And while Knocking Live Video [App Store] allows users to stream live to another iPhone, Ustream is the first to allow true broadcast-style streaming.

Knocking Live Video [App Store, Free], the first app in the App Store with the ability to stream live video over 3G and Wi-Fi, has been approved, thanks to the intervention by none other than Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs. After initially being rejected for using private API's (the only way to enable video streaming in an iPhone app), the developer decided to write to Steve Jobs to try to fight for it's approval. Surprisingly, he was successful.

The App Store has received quite a lot of criticism recently, first with Facebook developer Joe Hewitt's decision to stop development for the iPhone, and then Rogue Amoeba announcing the same thing a day later. To defend Apple's position, Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice-president for worldwide product marketing, sat down with BusinessWeek for an interview on the matter.

In the interview, Schiller defends the review process by stating that they've created a store that people can trust:

Apple has denied RSSPlayer from the App Store yet again, this time for the same reason as Rogue Amoeba: containing a picture of an iPhone. In it's previous life as Podcaster, the app could subscribe to, download, and listen to podcasts directly on the iPhone. Apple rejected it for duplicating the services provided by the podcast section of iTunes and the iPod app, but later let it in after a name change and a slight change in functionality.