Apple's Schiller defends App Store approval process

In an interview with BusinessWeek, Apple's senior vice president for worldwide product marketing, Phil Schiller, defended the computing giant's much-criticized approval policies for iPhone and iPod touch applications submitted to the App Store, maintaining the number of potential issues continues to rise in direct proportion to the growing number of apps. "We've built a store for the most part that people can trust," Schiller says. "You and your family and friends can download applications from the store, and for the most part they do what you'd expect, and they get onto your phone, and you get billed appropriately, and it all just works."

According to Schiller, most application submissions are approved, and some are sent back to the developer for tweaks--the majority of requested changes focus on technical fixes and software bugs, but in about 10 percent of instances where Apple requests changes, content is the culprit. "There have been applications submitted for approval that will steal personal data, or which are intended to help the user break the law, or which contain inappropriate content," Schiller says. About 1 percent of apps fall into gray areas Apple did not previously anticipate (for example, apps developed to help gamblers cheat at casinos). Trademark violations (including unauthorized use of Apple's own trademarks) are another ongoing concern: "If you don't defend your trademarks, in the end you end up not owning them," Schiller says. "And sometimes other companies come to us saying they've seen their trademarks used in apps without permission. We see that a lot."

Schiller's interview follows on the heels of several high-profile developer defections from the iPhone platform. Among them: Paul Kafasis, a developer with noted Mac software maker Rogue Amoeba, who publicly renounced the App Store after an updated version of the firm's Airfoil Speakers Touch app spent over three and a half months lingering in approval purgatory due to its inclusion of images of Apple products. "We wanted to ship a simple bug fix, and it took almost four months of slow replies, delays, and dithering by Apple," Kafasis writes on the Rogue Amoeba blog. "All the while, our buggy [version] was still available. There's no other word for that but ‘broken.'" Schiller didn't specifically address the Rogue Amoeba controversy, but did say "We need to delineate something that might confuse the customer and be an inappropriate use of a trademark from something that's just referring to a product for the sake of compatibility. We're trying to learn and expand the rules to make it fair for everyone."

For more of the Schiller interview:
- read this BusinessWeek article

Related articles:
App Store surpasses 100,000 iPhone applications
Apple breaks its silence on App Store rejections