WASHINGTON – Apple has rejected a grad student’s iPhone app designed to map out U.S. drone strikes on the grounds it contains objectionable content.
Josh Begley, a student at New York University, created “Drone+” to flesh out the unmanned aerial vehicles’ role in U.S. strikes along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, according to a New York Times blog. Previous versions of the app had been rejected by Apple for including the Google Maps emblem and for providing information that was “not useful or entertaining enough.”
An updated version was rejected again for violating App Store provision 16.1, which limits “excessively objectionable or crude content.”
“I wanted to have a more granular sense of what drone strikes really did look like out of genuine curiosity,” Begley told the Times. His app does not contain graphic images of the aftermath of strikes, he says, but rather just their locations on a map.
The information is based on Bureau of Investigative Journalism data, the Times reports, and was used in a more comprehensive app from The Guardian.
“Mr. Begley appears to be the latest developer to fall down the rabbit hole of Apple policies that determine what can and cannot be distributed through the App Store for iPhones and iPads,” Times blogger Nick Wingfield writes. “Most of the time, Apple’s system for approving apps seems to work pretty smoothly, considering the huge volume of apps the company has to deal with. But when it goes awry, it can lead to some real head scratching.”
The story was first reported by Wired.com.
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