Apple sinks to new levels of stupid in South Park App Store row

Ever since the App Store opened for submissions, Apple’s been—and this is perhaps the most charitable description—inconsistent. Although I disagree with the regular statements from Apple’s competition about walled gardens (and Ballmer recently arguing, without a hint of irony, that iPhone is stifling innovation, and if only everyone was using Windows Mobile, they’d have more choice), whoever at Apple is dictating policy regarding App Store submission needs a good swift kick in the nuts.

Apple hit the news when it denied Podcaster entry to the App Store last September. The bizarre argument was that it duplicated functionality of an existing Apple app, but not one on the iPhone—instead, Podcaster wasn’t allowed distribution because, in part, it duplicated functionality in the desktop version of iTunes.

Now, however, Apple has descended to new levels of stupid. In development since last autumn, the South Park app has now been rejected without ceremony. Apple’s reasoning? The content is “potentially offensive”.

In itself, this is understandable. But when you look at the iPhone ‘ecosystem’, the decision is nothing short of batsh*t crazy.

Reason 1: South Park episodes are available to buy in full in the iTunes Store, and they happily play on—you guessed it—an iPhone.

Reason 2: South Park may have plenty of somewhat offensive and puerile moments, but that is at least a veneer over a satirical and cunningly intelligent cartoon. That, however, can’t be said of the slew of boob-jiggle and fart apps that Apple’s happily allowed into the App Store of late. Way to be consistent, Apple!

Reason 3: I’m an adult. No, really. Lots of people who own iPhones are also adults. No, no, it’s actually true. To that extent, it’s a bit rich of Apple to take the ‘offensive’ line with a cartoon that’s shown on television—it’s not like Parker and Stone thought: “You know what? Let’s change South Park, just for iPhone! Its new name shall be Gimp Chainsaw Blood Gouge Sex Death Park!”.

So, Apple, with a slightly edgy but perfectly safe app, let people decide for themselves whether to buy it. After all, I suspect the vast majority of people buying a South Park app are actually going to be South Park fans, and they’ll only take offence if it’s rubbish.

The App Store is undoubtedly iPhone’s killer app, but if Apple keeps indiscriminately knifing apps for no real reason—and high-profile ones at that—it’s going to be iPhone’s killer. It’ll only be so long before rivals start to catch up, and although I’ve no doubt that the Microsoft App Store won’t be as good as Apple’s, it’ll be ‘good enough’ for many. If Apple’s still playing the stupid card when that happens, a whole bunch of people will be yelling “screw you guys,” ditching their iPhones and going elsewhere.

Banking, it seems, isn’t the only career where you can just make crazy sh*t up and get paid for it. Yet again, this week saw an analyst banging the ‘cheap iPhone’ drum. This time, RBC’s Mike Abramsky said we’d see a distinct $99 ‘entry level’ iPhone this summer (source: Silicon Alley Insider).

The things Abramsky claims could appear in the device are pretty funny, and somewhat akin to Apple (a company that, remember, gets off on selling high-quality, high-end products for suitably high price tags) shooting itself in the foot, then the kneecap and then the balls, for good measure. They include:

• A lower-resolution camera. This would require special effort from Apple, as anyone with an existing iPhone will know. The camera is already dreadful. About the only way it could get substantially worse is if Apple removed it entirely, and just made the Camera app snap black rectangles.
• No 3G or GPS, thereby knifing two of the most important aspects of the new iPhone.

To compensate, an updated iPhone would include a screen with 720 x 480 pixels (shoe-horned in, presumably, by someone pushing really, really hard) that would instantly annoy every single iPhone developer and knacker the App Store (given that developers would have to cater for multiple devices), and video.

So, where has this analyst heard the news from? Tim Cook? A recovering Steve Jobs? Nope. He’s just pulled it out of his butt, in the special way that analysts do. This kind of thing wouldn’t be so bad, but people actually listen to these guys. When they say “Apple will release an iMac for $5 that will give you a back massage on demand”, the industry laps it up, and then demolishes Apple when it doesn’t deliver. And these guys get paid lots of money for spouting whatever comes to mind.

Still, I’m sure us mere mortals can take solace in the fact that analysts will probably be first up against the wall when the revolution comes. Even before the bankers.

Update: anyone arriving at this article today, it was written as a reaction to utterly distasteful and disrespectful articles doing the rounds at the time, speculating on Jobs’s health. Jobs died on October 5, 2011, two-and-a-half years later. He never did get well, but I hope the time he had between this article being written and the day of his death were full of joy.

It’s true: Steve Jobs—Apple messiah and all-round clever chap—is going to shuffle off his mortal coil, kick the bucket, and generally become an ex-Jobs. But here’s the thing: it’s probably not going to happen this week, this month or even this year. The guy’s had and survived cancer, now clearly has a medical problem that means he’s not getting nutrients from food, and is under a lot of constant stress that’s making his condition worse. The most obvious medical advice for such a thing: take a break—a long one—until you’re well again.

Of course, the latest from Apple sent the stock markets crazy, due to idiots somehow equating Apple with Jobs. Sure, Jobs ‘saved’ Apple to some extent during his return, but many forget that Apple now is Jobs, in the sense that his personality is directly infused into company procedures and processes. In other words, even though Jobs won’t be at Apple for the forseeable future, Apple still is Jobs anyway. It’s hardly the most confusing concept in the world, but a lot of people appear to be having trouble understanding this basic fact. (Also, publications and analysts that continue to rattle off ‘Apple needs to start thinking about a successor’ garbage, please shoot yourself—anyone who genuinely believes that Apple has no contingency plans doesn’t deserve the tag ‘journalist’ or ‘analyst’. In fact, they barely qualify for ‘sentient’.)

So: Tim Cook will take over for a while (a safe pair of hands, to say the least), and Apple will continue working on products already devised for the next 18 months, during which time Jobs will still be directly involved in important strategic decisions anyway. And even if, God forbid, Jobs does end up bowing out in a very final sense sooner than expected, Apple’s got the likes of Cook, Ive and Schiller to see the company onwards.

In the meantime, here’s hoping publications finally get bored of the speculation and rather morbid obsession of “Will he? Won’t he?” surrounding Jobs. Maybe one of them will even have enough guts and integrity—and I know this is unlikely, but what the hell—to merely publish a piece with four simple words: Get well soon, Steve.

Although the reports of Macworld’s might be spot-on

Once again, the sky is falling in Apple-land. The Cupertino giant’s announcement yesterday that Macworld Expo 2009 would be its last and that Phil Schiller would deliver the final keynote rather than Steve Jobs sent the rumour mill into a frenzy. Clearly, Steve must be at death’s door, right?

Alternatively, rumour-mongers, think about it for just a second, using your brain. Apple is quitting the Macworld Expo, but not its own (increasingly frequent) announcements and launch events. It’s not prepping for Steve Jobs’ death—it’s prepping for Macworld’s, and in a fairly spiteful manner. Consider this: Jobs doesn’t do this keynote, thereby massively lowering expectations and downplaying the event. You can bet he’ll be fronting the next ‘Apple keynote’, though.

Although Internet Explorer’s marketshare slide isn’t proving steep, it almost seems irreversible at this point. Latest trend charts now put IE’s share under 70% for the first time in many years. Interestingly, Chrome’s near-1% doesn’t appear to have been at the expense of Safari and Firefox either, since both are well up on January 2008.

It remains to be seen how Internet Explorer 8 will affect these figures, but for designers still mulling over whether to make the leap to standards compliance and stop designing for the largest market, the path is now clear. Once, you might have been unconvinced by the ‘one in ten using something other than IE’ argument, but with a third of users now browsing with something other than Microsoft’s giant, it’d be absurd to author web pages in any other manner.