Baby Shaker - The Mobile App Turkeys of 2009

Why is it a turkey?
Chances are Sikalosoft's Baby Shaker isn't actually the worst iPhone application ever. It's in the team photo, of course--the app (depicted here) simulated the shaking of an infant, complete with the tagline "On a plane, on the bus, in a theater. Babies are everywhere you don't want them to be! They're always distracting you from preparing for that big presentation at work with their incessant crying. Before ‘Baby Shaker' there was nothing you could do about it. See how long you can endure his or her adorable cries before you just have to find a way to quiet the baby down!" But the worst iPhone app of all time? What about all the tasteless, stupid and offensive apps we never see thanks to Apple's stringent approval policies? Surely there have been (and will continue to be) far worse.

And yet what makes Baby Shaker unique is that we did see it--somehow, this idiotic application got past the guards and made it into the App Store, a feat about as remarkable as Andy Dufresne breaking out of Shawshank State Penitentiary. Perhaps even more astounding, Apple accepted responsibility for the debacle, issuing a statement reading "This application was deeply offensive and should not have been approved for distribution on the App Store. When we learned of this mistake, the app was removed immediately. We sincerely apologize for this mistake and thank our customers for bringing this to our attention." As for Sikalosoft, the developer limited its own response to a message on its website reading "Okay, so maybe the Baby Shaker iPhone app was a bad idea." Ya think?