NIN app store rejection: huh?

On Saturday afternoon Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails announced via his Twitter account that Apple had rejected the 1.0.3 update to his nin: access app for iPhone, after approving the original 1.0 version last month, due to “objectionable content.” If ever there was a controversy that started brewing over a weekend and was just waiting for a weekday to roll around so it could explode, this is it. Here’s a hint: “Trent Reznor” is currently a trending topic on Twitter, right up there with Wolverine and swine flu. Just wait until the mainstream media gets ahold of this one any minute now.

The problems here are several. One is that Apple claims to have rejected the app update due to its inclusion of “The Downward Spiral” – a Nine Inch Nails album that’s been on sale in a different part of the iTunes Store for years. Another problem is that, as Trent put it in a post to his own forums yesterday, The Downward Spiral “is not available anywhere in the iPhone app.” So what exactly is Apple suddenly objecting to in version 1.0.3 that it didn’t seem to have a problem with when it approved version 1.0? It’s not clear.

Compounding the problem is the fact that nin: access has been one of the most (perhaps the most) hotly anticipated artist-oriented iPhone apps to ever make it into the App Store. And of course Trent Reznor is one of the most respected and fiercely independent musicians on the planet. He’s also a long-time user of Apple products and was featured as such on Apple.com earlier this decade.

While Apple’s policies in question do center around censorship, this fiasco appears to be less about censorship and more about flat-out incompetence on Apple’s part. The company has been absurdly inconsistent in its approval process from day one; while ninety-six percent of all submitted apps are approved, the reasons for the rejection of the other four percent have never made much sense to the outside observer. First the fart apps were disallowed, then after a public furor on principle alone from iPhone users who probably never would have downloaded the app anyway, Apple relented. Since then things have seemingly swung too far in the other direction, and last week there was another public furor over the approval of a “Baby Shaker” app that as its name implied, made a game out of shaking babies to death. After the controversy, Apple quickly yanked the app. Perhaps they’ve since swung back to being overly restrictive, and nin: access simply got caught in the crossfire.

While Apple can’t seem to win, getting pelted from both sides by people who think the approval process is too restrictive and by people who think it’s not restrictive enough, it doesn’t appear that Apple has anything beyond the vaguest of policies for what is allowable and what isn’t, or if there are specific policies they’re either being changed daily or being ignored by the individual employees who are manning the approval cubicles. The approval process can take weeks, and even the developers have no idea when a submitted app might actually appear in the App Store. This even applies to minor updates, with some developers going so far as to list the “already submitted” changes in the app description as a selling point. And now we find out that the approval process is so inconsistent that an app can be approved one month and then the same app with minor bug fixes can be rejected the next.

That this happened to someone as famous and respected to Trent Reznor, and that this happened to an app as popular and anticipated as nin: access, will make this a story. But far from an isolated case, this snafu is most likely an indicator of the inconsistency and vagueness being employed by Apple’s app evaluators on a daily basis. Apple has yet to get this potentially embarrassing situation under control as the controversies have gradually grown larger; perhaps the world stage upon which Trent Reznor’s rage is about to play out will motivate Apple to finally put the kind of resources into the App Store approval process that developers (and more importantly, iPhone users) deserve. The reward for hard work is more hard work, and now that Apple has done this wonderful thing of giving us the iPhone and the App Store, it’s now time for them to get to work on making the app approval process just a bit less idiotic.

Jason O’Grady over at ZDNet has said, probably sarcastically, that “it’s almost as if Apple is using automated tools to approve submitted apps.” But you know what? He just might be on to something.