thomas fitzgerald.net

I had refrained from commenting on the whole situation regarding rogue amoeba’s decision to stop developing for the iPhone because the whole thing had me seeing red with anger. No, not anger at Apple for it’s “unreasonable” app store policies, but anger that the story had gotten so much attention and that people weren’t calling rogue amoeba out for this bullshit. First of all, they claimed that tat the first rejection was ambiguous. Unless you’re suffering from a concussion, when Apple tells you your app is being rejected because it uses their copyrighted images, and you know you’re using Apple images, regardless of where they came from, to claim that you weren’t sure what they were referring to is disingenuous at best.

Then there’s the way the story has been picked up by others. People are claiming that Apple delayed a bug fix of the software by three months, but this is simply not true. They told Rogue Amoeba what they had to do, but rather than comply they decided to stick to their guns. Make no mistake, it was rogue amoeba who caused the three month delay in getting a bug fix out to their customers, not Apple. John Gruber (whom I greatly respect) goes on the defence for RA claiming that the use of copyright statement is not in the SDK (it’s right there in black and white) and that they had no way of knowing that this was a violation until they had developed and submitted the App, because the details of the infringement were only in the rejection letter. This isn’t true though because it’s right there in the agreement. Gruber even posts the relevant section from the SDA agreement where it references the acceptable use of Apple logos and Images which contains the exact language of the rejection letter word for word. I also find it ridiculous that they claimed they weren’t sure why it was being rejected, but waited till the second rejection before they emailed Apple to get clarification.