Daring Fireball: More on Apple’s Removal of Airfoil Speakers Touch From the App Store:
“It’s not enough to comply with the letter of the rules; developers must comply with the spirit of them as well. Finding a loophole in the letter of the rules doesn’t grant you a Get Out of Jail Free card in the App Store. It will (hopefully) just lead to Apple adding a new rule to close the loophole. (This is not to imply that Rogue Amoeba saw themselves as taking advantage of a loophole; rather, I think it was a reasonable misunderstanding of the spirit of the guidelines.)”
(Via Daring Fireball.)
Gruber is always at his best when he digs in and does some in-depth investigative reporting like this. Note, he doesn’t make a judgment on whether or not Apple is in the right here, and he doesn’t try to blame Rogue Amoeba, either; he’s simply laying out what are most likely the reasons for the removal. And his argument makes perfect sense.
All app developers run the risk of bumping into Apple’s prerogative. It’s part of being on the App Store. If you try to be innovative and come up with creative ways to add features that Apple doesn’t provide in the OS itself, you run an even higher risk.
Keep in mind, however, that it’s not in Apple’s best interest to remove an app for frivolous reasons. And because Apple is so secretive as a company, the real reasons for removals like this never become 100% clear.
AirPlay is one of those things that probably scares the crap out of the execs in music industry. I can’t imagine Apple didn’t have to have a few discussions involving lawyers to settle the fears of those execs about what could and couldn’t be done with this wireless music streaming technology. If you think about why AirPlay doesn’t already do what Airfoil Speakers Touch added in this version, there are only three possibilities; either Apple didn’t think of adding that feature themselves, they couldn’t figure out how, or they were forbidden by their licensing agreements from doing so. Which one is the most likely?
When an app developer comes along and extends what AirPlay can do, that seems obvious and awesome to us, but we have no idea whether or not it violates some agreement Apple has with the labels, in other words.
I have no idea if this is the case, of course. But that’s the point. None of us knows. I’m just pointing out that there could be a variety of reasons that Apple will never talk about and that we aren’t in a position to judge.
Having said that, this still sucks for Rogue Amoeba and the state of the App Store ecosystem. The more good developers get punished for being clever, the more likely the App Store gets reduced to crapware and boring software that never takes a risk. Apple needs to come up with some better way of avoiding these sorts of abrupt removals from the App Store, and it needs to find better ways to communicate with the developer community. Getting rejected sucks; being removed one morning for no apparent reason is every developer’s worst nightmare.
