While we don’t want to turn this into the rejected-app-of-the-day column, as an end-cap to the week, and perhaps a chance to test out the theory we proposed earlier in the BargainBin post, we thought we’d pass along one last example of Apple App Store weirdness, via Mippin:

Quite early on in the process they failed us because of rude words in some of the Internet articles we were publishing. Early this week Tweetie was rejected for the same reason- they kicked up such a stink on Twitter that Apple backed down within hours and accepted it. When this happened to us though, 3 weeks ago, we bowed to their greater wisdom and implemented 2 levels of checking for our iPhone application to prevent “objectionable” content getting through. We rate all our 50,000 feeds in Mippin and prevent most if it even getting to the user, then just to be sure we check every word in the article real-time for a list of rude words and if one appears we block the display of the content from the server. We thought this was enough, but this week we got rejected because of a YouTube video – we were amazed at this. In the very amusing video “sxephil” does use one rude word, but in our minds YouTube have allowed this through – its certainly acceptable to them. What’s even worse we found the same video through Apple’s own YouTube application on the iPhone

Friday the 13th? “Duplicates functionality” coverall? Vestiges of the same Tweetie “Church Lady” reviewer? And will it get to the point where developers can cry “pocket rejection” or “incompetence” when even valid issues are raised by Apple? What do you think?

Comparative screenshots after the break…