Thursday, August 06, 2009

Apple censors English dictionary

As an admitted Apple fanboy, even I am getting pretty tired of Apple's incomprehensible and puritanical method of approving/disapproving iPhone applications for its iTunes Store. Enough already, as they are now censoring the English Dictionary! According to Ninjawords developer,Phil Crosby, via TGDaily, Apple rejected the application only two days after it was submitted.
"We were rejected for objectionable content. They provided screenshots of the words 's***' and 'f***' showing up in our dictionary's search results," Crosby told Fireball's John Gruber. "What's interesting is that we spent a good deal of time making it so that you must type vulgar words in their entirety, and only then will we show you suggestions in the search results. For instance, if you type 'fuc,' you will not see 'f***' as a suggestion."
The application was rejected two more times before:
"Someone from Apple called to say we were being rejected again for illicit content, and no matter what we did to our dictionary, it will have to be 17+ to make it to the App Store. We gave in and said fine, hoping that we could get on the App Store immediately since the solution to their rejection was a simple metadata change. However, the App Store reviewer would have none of that. We would have to resubmit an entirely new binary and get to the back of the queue before they would look at it again," said Crosby.
A very edited version was finally approved for sale last week.

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