"Apple Rejects App That Tracks Drone Attacks"

Drone Attacks App

Apple has rejected an app for iPhone that keeps track of deaths caused by U.S. drone strikes due to its “objectionable” content. The company pulled out Drones+ from its App Store, which sends text messages to your iPhone whenever the media reports casualties resulting from a drone strike and even shows the locations of such strikes on a Google map.

Apple has rejected Drones+ three times this summer alone, citing App Store guidelines that prohibit “objectionable” content, according to the app’s creator Josh Begley.

While Begley, a graduate student at New York University, understood Apple’s position, news reports had pointed out the inconsistencies of Apple in wielding its “objectionable content” rule in rejecting apps. The New York Times reported that the same objectionable material found in Drones+ is nearly identical to material available on the Apple-approved app from The Guardian, which included an interactive map of drone strikes.

Netizen reactions in the report wonder about the inconsistent standards Apple applied in rejecting apps. “Who made Apple the world’s morality police,” asked one reader for CNET.

Another commented, “Why not simply reject any app that provides news on the grounds that someone will read something that they find objectionable?”

Source: The Los Angeles Times, via CNET