That seems to be the message being sent by Cupertino this week in a very public iPhone app rejection fiasco. Word broke on Thursday that Apple had rejected a cartoon app created by Mark Fiore, a cartoonist who recently made history by becoming the first online-only journalist to win a Pulitzer. Fiore received the award for animations he’d published at the Web site of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Fiore’s iPhone app, however, was reportedly shot down by Apple because it “ridicule[d] public figures” — you know, as most satirical political cartoons tend to do. But the story didn’t end there: The general silliness of a ban on political satire, coupled with Fiore’s high-profile honor for that same genre of work, led to a public outcry over Apple’s actions.

And that public outcry has seemingly now led to Apple rethinking its ban.

Apple’s Pulitzer Rejection Reversal

Fiore, according to an interview published in The Wall Street Journal on Friday, received a call from Apple shortly after his story started receiving widespread attention online. The Apple representative, Fiore says, suggested he resubmit his app.

“I feel kind of guilty,” Fiore tells The Journal. “I’m getting preferential treatment because I got the Pulitzer.”

To be fair to Fiore, it’s probably more directly the public attention than the Pulitzer itself that caught Apple’s eye. But the honor, no doubt, illustrated the validity of satirical work in the eyes of the real world — the eyes, that is, outside of Apple’s carefully guarded walls.

Apple’s App Store and Political Cartoons

This wasn’t Apple’s first clash with politically charged App Store content. The Cupertino team put the kibosh on an app featuring the work of Mad Magazine cartoonist Tom Richmond last fall. Richmond’s app, entitled “Bobble Rep,” featured bobblehead-like caricatures of U.S. senators and representatives. Apple eventually reconsidered its rejection following a similar wave of online outrage.

Other authors have faced struggles, too, ranging from a guy who made a caricature-driven election game to a developer who created a cartoony countdown clock for the end of the Bush administration. But with the advent of the iPad and its focus on redefining the way we receive information, the concept of content-based censorship — particularly when the guidelines are so murky and inconsistent — is more troubling than ever.

“Suddenly Apple’s control freak approach threatens the development of the very technology it is supposed to be innovating, by placing restrictions and outright rejections upon the content that would be consumed via [its] devices,” Richmond writes on his blog. “Apps for publications and newspaper content won’t be very useful if [the iPad] only lets us see stuff that Apple and Steve Jobs thinks we should see.”

For now, it appears satire and politics will remain a wishy-washy, gray area within Apple’s app world. Not to fret, though: Bodily functions are still A-OK.

Resource:
Yahoo News

Fiore irked Apple’s censorious staffers with his cartoons making fun of the Balloon Boy hoax and the pair that famously crashed a White House party, according to Laura McGann at the Neiman Journalism Lab.

Fiore won a Pulitzer Monday for animations he made for the SFGate, the online home of the San Francisco Chronicle. But Fiore, who is a freelancer who runs a syndication business, was rejected by Apple in December for an app called NewToons that features his work.

According to a Dec. 21 e-mail reprinted by Neiman, Apple rejected his app because it “contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.14 from the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement which states: Applications may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple’s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.”

Neither Fiore nor Apple responded to requests for comment.

The news of the rejection comes not long after Apple decided to purge its App store of content that included nudity, a retroactive ban that included apps from respected German publications such as Bild and Der Spiegel.

Fiore’s rejection may be especially disconcerting to news and media organizations, many of which are betting heavily on iPad apps as a way to get users to pay to read magazines and newspapers, and to get advertisers to pay print-ad prices for online content. (Online ads cost a small percentage of what ads in glossy magazines cost, in no small part because the net has almost infinite advertising space.)

Apple has built a little slab of Disneyland with its iPad, which is meant to be an experience unsullied by provocative or crude material. It’s beautiful and enticing — the company has already sold more than a half million of them in the first two weeks it’s been available — but it’s not the real world.

Publishers, including such august organizations such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Wired.com’s parent company Condé Nast, see a solution to their declining dead-tree ad sales in building a pay-to-play attraction in that park. But they need to understand that to do so, they have to play by Mickey Mouse’s rules.

The signs have been there from the start, as Wired.com’s Brian Chen pointed out in February. Apple banned an e-book reading application once because it figured out that iPhone users could use it to read a free version of the Kama Sutra. Then last week, Apple abruptly banned apps developed using programs that translate apps into multiple platforms.

Adding the news of Fiore’s ban to that, the publishing world is now officially on notice that the iPad is Apple’s, and unlike with their print and web editions, they don’t have the final say when it comes to their own content on an Apple device.

Screenshot: Mark Fiore cartoon lampooning the nation’s telecoms for helping the Bush Administration illegally spy on their customers.

Resource:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/apple-bans-satire/

There are over 50 million Opera Mini users globally.

Opera Mini uses Opera’s servers to render and compress pages, thus increasing speed for the end user, and also working around Apple’s stringent rules.

The company says users of the iPhone over AT&T’s slower 2G Edge data will definitely feel the “uptake in speed.”

Whether all the downloads are just a curiosity or proof that iPhone/iPod Touch users are looking for choice within their hardware remains to be seen, but it seems pretty clear that Opera will be gaining a significant amount of users.

Resource:
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/article.cfm/2010/04/15/opera_mini_tops_all_of_apple_s_top_app_charts