Apple is flexing their quality control muscle by rejecting applications based on "limited utility." This, no doubt, a knee jerk response to pulling the expensive iPhone application I Am Rich and spawns a rejection of another app called Pull My Finger. I’m sure there are plenty more what many might call stupid, pointless, worthless applications that Apple is subjectively deciding not to publish and promote.

Techdirt’s Kevin Donavon makes an odd and not quite fitting comparison to Wikipedia, Twitter and CouchSurfing:

While I agree that the application in question has little use, this is a dangerous precedent that could easily have been used to ban Wikipedia, Twitter or CouchSurfing.

I wouldn’t go that far. Look, the web has always been a fairly level playing field for whatever crazy idea someone can come up with and promote. If some dude with an application that does nothing more than be too expensive and it gets popular, hey, more power to them. Same thing with a sophomoric humor application like Pull My Finger.

Wikipedia solved an itch: the ability for regular people to be able to contribute to an encyclopedia collectively. To a much lesser and more niche following, the same applies to Twitter where the cliche ’short and sweet’ and the popularity of text messaging converge. Can’t speak for CouchSurfing because I don’t know much about them but again if they can find success with something you and I might think is silly but others enjoy then more power to them.

Apple has the business right to exercise whatever quality control they want around their App store. If their requirements are too restrictive or too vague this opens the playing field for somebody else to come along and compete. I realize it’s their playing field, but you could always make apps that run on competing phones, yes? Don’t get mad, go out and promote your app on an iPhone competitor that doesn’t reject applications that they deem as having limited utility.

What do you think? Is using "limited utility" a good idea for quality control? Or should Apple let iPhone have the quality control gauge? I believe the web is already a working example of quality control so that you don’t need to impose additional quality control standards on an application breeding ground if you, well, want it to breed.

Perhaps unrelated and of little concern to those who aren’t AAPL shareholders (disclaimer: I am a current AAPL shareholder) but as one I’d like to see Apple not use subjective rules like this for quality control for iPhone applications. They should ferret out anything that’s a security risk or spammy and if they don’t want porn, fine, that too, but beyond that, let the users be your QA team.

Mr. Donavon is right in one respect: having undefined quality control standards on one project will open a company to these questions about other services that accept submissions from third parties. For that reason alone I think if you are planning on releasing something where other developers submit programs to you, it would be wise not to impose subjective quality control rules.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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