Censorship in the mobile marketplace, or "Welcome to the Nerf Phone"

An interesting article came up this morning on the Phandroid blog: Enjoy Your iPhone, prudes!

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, lately. As a software engineer, this topic hits close to home. It’s time we start treating smartphones like the computers they are, and give users full control over their environment. All devices should have sideload capabilities, and no user or seller should be denied an app he or she wants or needs because some reviewer got up on the wrong side of his bed that morning.

Any app store needs to be open to any app, as long as the software doesn’t harm the user, the phone or the network.

By making it impossible for users to side-load apps (at least without a $99 developer subscription and a Macintosh computer), Apple has basically become the only one who can decide what software is run on the iPhone. They can (and do) pull or refuse to approve apps on pretty arbitrary grounds. My biggest gripe was when a podcast download app got denied; we still don’t have a real podcast aggregator on the iPhone; the one built in to the iTunes store doesn’t let you browse any URL, doesn't allow you to subscribe to podcasts, and it’s limited to 10 MB. The app itself didn't break any rules, and yet it was rejected. It turns out that Apple was going to introduce the ability to download single podcast episodes in a future update of the iPhone OS, one that wouldn't be available to consumers until several months later.

To add insult to injury, there is now a podcast downloader in the app store, much too late to help the guy who was originally rejected over a year ago: http://www.nextdayoff.com/

How can you form a business strategy around a product when the product can get yanked at any time? How can consumers rely on a platform when the sole vendor for that platform can suddenly make software unavailable? How can corporations deploy that device internally when some app they depend on could suddenly be rejected from the app store?

A more fair approach is to do three things:

1. Allow any safe app in the store, period. The only apps that should be rejected are apps that either lie to users about what they do, spy on users, or somehow harm the device. For example, a game that contains zombie code that could performs DOS attacks would be prohibited.
2. Categories apps based on adult content: we should have 3 levels of “consenting adult” apps. Level 1 should be for apps that may contain “incidental” content, such as browser apps or apps like Craigslist. This is an app that could still be used by a kid or a teenager, as long as they’re careful. Level 2 should be for anything with explicit content that wouldn’t make it in to the current app store.
3. Allow for tagging and filtering of apps. Developers and users should be able to tag apps for quicker sorting and searching. There are other problem areas in the app store besides sex and violence: obnoxious ad-ware products are the top of my hit list right now, and a well managed tagging system would go a long way toward mitigating that problem. I think all apps should also have either a free trial or a simple to use 24 hour no questions asked return window. I’m not the only person who’s been ripped off by a crappy app that doesn’t really do what it promises (or doesn’t even work at all.)

On the other hand, if Apple is going to keep its draconian practices, why not add some more rules? Apple, here are my suggestions:

• No Adware: or at least allow users to pay a couple of dollars for a no-ad version. If the app makes 50 cents in ads, why not let the user pay a dollar and ditch the ads?
• No chat or IM apps: those compete with SMS, and AT&T can't charge 20 cents a message!
• No browser apps: after all, a web browser might link to a site somewhere with naughty pictures.
• No games: we don't want kids wasting their time playing games when they should be studying or playing outdoors in the sunshine.
• No downloading video or audio content from your PC. Those might have bad words or dirty pictures.
• No MMS or SMS. Too many kids are sexting these days. We need to put a stop that.
• No phone calls: we couldn't have people talking dirty to each other on the phone, can we?

As you can see, if Apple really cared about the safety its users, they would turn their expensive phone in to a brick. But wait, bricks can be used to bash in people's heads. So Apple must immediately recall all iPhones and replace them with Nerf toys that can't actually hurt anyone.