iPhone Apps

Rhapsody iPhone App Allows Downloading Songs, for Listening Offline [Rhapsody]
Rhapsody just released a little teaser video for the next version of its iPhone app (to be followed closely by its new Android app) that marks a major change for the service: You can now download songs instead of streaming.
It's great news for users of Rhapsody's $15-per-month all-you-can-eat service, who can now simply download songs from the catalog for later use instead of depending on unreliable wireless signals. As the voice of Rhapsody's disembodied hand notes, that'll also save battery life, since just playing a music file is a pretty low-intensity function and streaming music is fairly draining on a battery. Even better, it'll reduce frustration with AT&T or a lack of nearby hotspots. The app is in the final approval process now, so it should be out within a few days.
Oh, and for Android users: The Rhapsody Android app, now in beta, is just about done with its testing time and should be appearing in the Android Market any day now. Rhapsody needs this kind of market coverage—if Microsoft's Windows Phone Series 7 phones are as good as they look, Rhapsody's going to be in a tough fight with MS's Zune Pass this fall. [Rhapsody]
This Week's Best iPhone Apps [IPhone Apps]
In this week's bipolar app roundup: Foursquare, squared! Slow ISPs, tattled on! Videos, easily streamed! Street Fighter fans' high standards, met! Twitter apps, set free! Your entire life, documented! Your every plan, shared! And more...
This Week's Apps
To view the gallery as a single page, click here.
This Week's iPhone News on Giz
(Video of the upcoming Sword and Sworcery EP)
• GuitarBud Plugs a Guitar Directly Into an iPhone
• When iPhone Games Approach Art, and When They Don't
• Google Mobile Search Reveals What's In Stock Nearby
• iPhone 4.0 Firmware to Bring Multitasking This Summer?
• Irresistible iPhone Apps Fridge Magnets
• It's Time to Declare War Against Apple's Censorship
• You Will Have the Power of a PS3 In Your Pocket In 3 Years
• Apple Must Feature PixieTea In Their Next iPhone Ad
• Case-mate Hug Review: A Wireless iPhone Charging Pad That Actually Works Well
• Taliban Leader, iPhone User
• Apple 'iKey' Places a Combination Lock on Your Wallet
• BTW, Wi-Fi Scanner Apps Were Begging to Get Banned by Apple
• Apple's Sexy App Purge Was Just the Beginning
• Tekken Will Come to iPhone
• Steve Jobs Says "No," iPad Won't Tether To iPhone
This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory. Have a great weekend, everybody!
Oh MGD 64 iPhone App, Guide Me to a Healthier Lifestyle! [Beer]
I don't know about you, but I used to be the case a day type. You know, pick up a 24 pack in the morning, sort my cardboard and aluminum recycling in the evening. Then, one app changed my life.
Of all companies, it was MillerCoors—producers MGD64, otherwise known as the beverage that started off as a noxious novelty brew to be sold at Spencer's that became so popular with frat houses and middle aged women alike that it was marketed as a real product—who recognized the need for me to take better care of myself.
So they launched Pedometer 64, the only iPhone app pedometer that's sponsored by a barely alcoholic, 64-calorie concoction of water, hops, liquid corn byproduct and the cloned tears of the world's first castrated man, which had been frozen in amber for millenia prior to MillerCoors winning the Sotheby's auction.
And, after waiting to turn 17—thank goodness for the law-appropriate age gate on that download, or who knows where I'd have ended up—I walked off all the weight I'd gained my junior year of high school, 64 unfulfilling kilocalories at a time.
But while I'm healthier, happier and even more smug when donning my iPhone, I've been left with a thirst for beer...and life...that simply refuses to be quenched. Yet I walk on, dammit. I walk on. [iTunes]
GuitarBud Plugs a Guitar Directly Into an iPhone [IPhone]
GuitarBud is a $29 adapter that allows you to plug a guitar right into an iPhone. How is that useful? Well if I ever learned to play that guitar in my closet, I could:
• Record riffs
• Tune the strings
• Play with realtime audio effects
• Share riffs in the cloud
• ...and all of this with direct line-in quality, with the help of a few apps
If there's one, single testament to the App Store's success, it's that a simple piece of hardware can immediately add so much extra functionality to the iPhone (because apps like Voice Memos, StompVox, Riff Raters and Guitar FX Deluxe already exist). But then again, if only the iPhone had a fatty 1/4-inch jack or two, we wouldn't even need the GuitarBud in the first place! [PRSCables via ShinyShiny via DVICE]
Take the Consumer Broadband Test, Help the FCC Keep ISPs In Check [Broadband]
Feel like your broadband's not living up to how it's advertised? Here's your chance to prove it: the FCC's introduced a Consumer Broadband Test that'll let you know exactly how good a connection you've got.
The test is in beta, but can be used for both fixed and mobile broadband, and there are already iPhone and Android apps available for download. You can already figure out your broadband speed with YouTube, but the info the FCC collects will be used by the agency to determine the state of broadband in the US. Hopefully it'll also be ammo to help reconcile the difference between hyperspeed ISP claims and your pokey broadband reality. [Broadband Task Force via Boing Boing]
PadNotes Offers Something Closer to Our Ideal iPad [IPad Apps]
PadNotes, an upcoming iPad app, offers a very simple, very useful function that the iPad seems to lack: You can type and draw on any PDF. Watch the video and you'll understand, the possibilities are quite impressive. [9to5Mac]
Chatroulette! iPhone! App! [IPhone Apps]
Err...you may be disappointed though. Particularly if you were on the look-out for some manbits.
Considering the iPhone doesn't have a front-facing camera, video-chatting on Chatroulette with your iPhone just wouldn't work. So it's no surprise the Chatroulette! (exclamation mark their own) app is a fakey. Developers xhumans describes the app as allowing you to connect "to a random user to chat with." Text chat, needless to say.
Sooo, you may as well go back to leaving your AIM details on bathroom walls, or just firing up your old ICQ username, if typing weird come-ons to strangers is what you seek. It'll save you 99 cents, anyway. [Chatroulette! via Mobile-Ent]
When iPhone Games Approach Art, and When They Don't [IPhone Apps]
There are a lot of iPhone games. Most of them are crap. A significant fraction are good. Few are great. Even fewer are great and original. Like this one might be!
The video you're seeing above is the opening stage of Sword & Sworcery EP, an iPhone aventure game due out H2 this year. It's got fantastically atmospheric music, a novel aesthetic, a rare control scheme, and most importantly, some kind of vision. A couple minutes of relatively eventless meandering are enough to hook me, which is rare for iPhone games that, in conceptual terms, tend to aim low.
Like this one! Gameloft's Zombie Infection looks fine, until you realize that it's a direct rip-off of Resident Evil 5. The control scheme is the same we've seen used in a lot of the company's other games—some of which are fantastic, by the way—and beyond the promise of a RE5-like gaming experience, and zombies, obviously, I'm seeing the same thing here as I saw with NOVA, or with Gangstar—a commodity game of questionable provenance. It may turn out to be fun, but that's the most it can really hope for.
Almost invariably, the iPhone games I love are the true originals, like Zen Bound or Noby Noby Boy or Spider. It's impossible to say if Sword & Sworcery will be one of those games, but it's clear that the developers' hearts are in the right place, which counts for a lot. [Touch Arcade]
Springpad Turns Your iPhone Into a Scrapbook for Everything [IPhone Apps]
Are you one of those people who collects stuff? Not material items, but little tiny scraps of information, be they photos, places, products, text snippets, ideas, or plans? Then maybe, maybe, you should try Springpad.
Springpad is a free iPhone app in the vein of Evernote, except with a broader scope. You can dump just about anything you encounter in here: photos are easily snapped and categorized; barcodes are scanned and filed; restaurants and stores are identified by manual or geo-based search; notes are pecked and saved; every input field, nearly, is augmented by a "search" option; and all your material syncs to the service's desktop web interface.
Since the app's promise—to make collecting and organizing little scraps of information super-easy—is so appealing, it's disappointing to find some interface awkwardness here; there's never anything missing, really, but you often find yourself pausing to look for the next command longer than you should have to. Regardless, information hoarders and relentless scrapbookers should probably give Springpad a chance—it's free, and for a first release, it does a lot. [Springpad]
Remainders - The Things We Didn't Post: Best and Brightest Edition [Remainders]
In today's Remainders: excellence. Carlos Slim overtakes Bill Gates as the world's richest man; Battlestar Galactica and the Beastie Boys get mashed-up real good; Everquest data is a motherlode for behavior scientists, and more!
Carlos > Bill
Earlier today, Forbes released this year's Billionaires List, a ranking that assigns specific names and amounts to a group that for the last eleven months you only loathed/envied with vagueness. This year, phones triumphed over computers: Carlos Slim, a Mexican telecommunications mogul, edged out Bill Gates for the top spot. The two have been battling it out for the last few years, though, trading the distinction of world's richest man like Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell traded the Donkey Kong title (even though the movie didn't show that). Together, they're worth over $100 billion. Slim and Gates, I mean. Billy Mitchell's hot sauce fortune, of course, is worth much more. [CNET]
Space Sabotage
I'm gonna come right out and admit: I've never seen Battlestar Galactica. Not a single episode. Come on! Give me a break. There's a lot of TV to watch and I'm only one man. Anyway, never having seen this program I don't know if there's some sort of tie-in with the Beastie Boys that would've engendered this project, a masterful shot-by-shot recreation of the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" with shots from BSG (did I get that acronym right?) Anyway, whether it makes sense or not, it's terrific. If you want both sides of your brain exploded, watch this handy side-by-side view of both videos at the same time. To be sure, a masterpiece of the mash-up age.
App Rock
When I say the word "synergy" what do you think of? If you shouted "A NEW VERSION OF POPULAR IPHONE GAME TAP TAP REVENGE FEATURING ALT-ROCK STARS KINGS OF LEON," well, you're right on track. The next installment in the Tapulous library will be Tap Tap Revenge with the Kings of Leon. It's the same app you know and love with 10 songs from the band, including their supposed hits "Use Somebody", "Notion", and "Sex on Fire." I consider myself a music dude, but somehow I've never really gotten around to listening to Kings of Leon. They seem to be the band MTV has picked as their go-to "rock" band these days—because, you know, it's good to have one of those to squeeze in between Lil Wayne and Taylor Swift at the VMAs—so that doesn't exactly bode well for them. But still, if you like Leon or you like tapping, keep an eye out for the new game, which will be $5 when it hits the app store. (Not sure how this affects the unlicensed follow up I've been working on, Fap Fap Revenge with Josie and the Pussycats) [Tapulous]
Questing for Science
If you're an Everquester and your parents/siblings/significant other/virtual significant other/imaginary significant other (choose one) is concerned about your habit, just tell them you're doing it for science. At its last meeting, the American Association for the Advancement of Science announced a deal with Sony that gives behavior scientists 60TB of Everquest server data to pore over. The researchers say that sorting through it all will be challenging but they think it could afford some unique insights into dynamic social networks and how they function. One thing they're sure to discovery: man's essential nerdiness. [Ars Technica]
The Future Of Camera-Based Input [IPhone Apps]
Not entirely dissimilar to the 2008 patent which showed an iPhone being controlled by camera-based input, is this German student's app, which controls the Maps app being controlled by the camera tracking hand movements through the app.
It's probably easiest if you watch the below, which demonstrates—in a slightly limited fashion—a hand being moved in front of the camera, controlling a dot moving around the iPhone's Google Maps app. The iPhone is connected to a laptop, which has the Map interface displayed. Interestingly, moving the hand further away from the camera zooms the map out, and moving it in zooms the map in.
I can't see how this app could be used any further though—or maybe I'm being too obtuse? The idea of having another way to control a touchscreen phone just seems a little crazy to me. [Daniel Bierwirth via Recombu]
The Barnes & Noble eReader iPad App Is On the Way (But Will Apple Maim It?) [Apple]
As specumalated in yesterday's Giz Explains, Barnes & Noble is coming out with an iPad version of their ebook app, which will, interestingly, include B&N's bookstore. Really?
I'm not expressing shock at a Barnes & Noble ebook app on the iPad—they have one on the iPhone, after all, and an option to buy books in the iPhone app.
While Apple's been allowing micropayments within apps, I'm really curious to see if Apple's going to allow an entire bookstore selling content—the same kind of content that Apple's going to be selling—be built into third-party apps on the iPad, even given the fact that Apple's own iBooks app and included bookstore is a separate, downloadable app.
That Barnes & Noble is trying this, though, isn't surprising—they're way behind Amazon, along with everybody else, so getting their platform and books on as many devices as possible is the obvious way to go. I'd expect Amazon to show up shortly as well, since the hardware is secondary, really, to getting people hooked on the platform. Letting people read on their Kindle, their phones, computer and tablets is really the only way it's viable.
The question is, even if these apps hit the iPad, stores intact, will Apple's more unsavory competitive instincts flare up? It's a distinct possibility, more than ever. The irony being that the quickest way to these kill competing ebook platforms is probably to allow them on the iPad, making it even easier for their users to make the switch. Though perhaps that's not lost on Apple. [Barnes & Noble via Electronista]
So Does Street Fighter IV Actually Work on the iPhone? [IPhone Apps]
Fighting games have always been awkward—and a little sad—as portable experiences, like Rottweilers stuffed in sweaters. Touchscreen controls, you'd think, would be adding a bowtie. But Street Fighter IV iPhone is a poodle in a cardigan. It fits.
It's a gorgeous port of Street Fighter IV, from flaming dragon punches—when you can pull them off—to ultra moves, which retain the quick cut scene close-up as a prelude to beating the unholy crap out of your opponent, to the booming, overly enthusiastic announcer that no Capcom fighting game is complete without. If you remember the days of Mortal Kombat on the Game Boy, it's kind of awe-inspiring how richly they've translated the audio and visual experience, even if the framerates do get a little choppy on anything pre-3GS.
What's missing? A bunch of characters, namely. You get just seven and a half: Ryu/Ken, Guile, Bison, Axel, Dhalsim, Chun Li and Blanka. Where's Honda, or Zangief? Multiplayer is over Bluetooth only—no Wi-Fi, no online service to get your ass beat by Japanese dudes who can EX counter your every move, half a world away.
Oh yes, the controls. The make or break. You have a sparse selection of buttons, at first glance, just four onscreen, plus the virtual joystick: punch, kick, special attack (which can be used for fully automatic specials, or just be the button you tap after performing the full movement for EX specials), and saving, which is used for focus attacks and counters. What you didn't know is that the ultra and super meters are buttons themselves, which you can tap to unleash ultimate destruction, if your meter's filled. Truthfully, this layout is as good it could get. It works, and feels as natural as it possibly could, tapping on a piece of glass with no feedback as to whether you hit the right "button." You won't even notice all that much that you're covering a bunch of the screen with your meatnuggets, honest.
What's both shocking natural and at times utterly frustrating is the joystick. It's awesome and smooth when you want to do nothing in particular. Like jumping, or moving back and forth. But when you NEED to nail that dragon punch, it will fail you more often than not. If it's more complicated than a hadouken, you will not pull the maneuver off flawlessly ever single time. I guarantee you. (This, I suspect, is one reason Zangief, my main character, got ditched. I'd have a stroke trying to pile drive people.)
If you're using a notebook right now, I want you to make a dragon punch motion on the trackpad with your thumb. See how weird that feels? Also, notice how you have no feedback as to whether you actually swiped correctly? There's no precision. And nothing guiding you to be precise. So, if you're a skilled player, who expects to nail your god combos flawlessly, you'll be frustrated by the touchscreen controls, because it's not going to come out every time you want it to. In fact, the better you are at Street Fighter, and the more skillfully you try to play this, the more this game will piss you off.
But! If you're in their spamming fireball motions, jabbing at punch and kick trying to kick the shit out of somebody for fun, you will have a blast. It's real Street Fighter, in your pocket, and it looks, sounds, feels and just plain is awesome. [iTunes]
Brizzly: The iPhone's New Best (Free) Twitter App [IPhone Apps]
It's not that Brizzly's perfect, or that it does justice to its source material (the unassailably pretty, wonderfully lean Birdfeed)—it's that it comes close enough, and it's free.
First, a quick lesson in the history of iPhone Twitter apps! Once, there was an app called Birdfeed. It was clever, fast, and visually distinctive. In fact, it was (up until just now) quite possibly one of the best Twitter apps available. It was also expensive, at $5. The developer, who was tired or something, sold the app to a little startup called Brizzly, which aggregates Twitter and Facebook feeds into a single interface (it's actually kinda neat, as an online service.) And so here we are.
Brizzly's rerelease (not an update; Birdfeed is no longer in the store) of Birdfeed changes the name, tweaks the UI, and slashes the price down to zero. The interface isn't as dazzling as it was before, and Birdfeed's trademark lack of a menu bar has given way to a standard row of icons. Brizzly actually adds a few new features, including a trending topics-esque News tab, for explaining what's going on in your feeds, and the same lovely pull-down feed refreshing as the other best iPhone Twitter app, Tweetie.
Even its apparent shortfallings aren't so bad: Yes, you have to sign up for a Brizzly account in order to use the app, but one you have, it's completely transparent. It's like Meebo in that sense. And no, the app doesn't have push notifications of its own, like Echofon does, but premium Twitter apps have long offloaded that responsibility to dedicated push apps like Boxcar. (Which is great beyond Twitter, by the way.)
In short, if you need a Twitter app but don't want to pay, Brizzly's the one. [iTunes]
Apple Must Feature PixieTea In Their Next iPhone Ad [IPhone]
A Chinese artist named PixieTea both recorded this song and shot the accompanying video almost entirely on an iPhone 3GS. The surprise? It's actually pretty decent! See for yourself:

Through a slew of music generation apps, like DrumMeister, Bassist, iDrum, NlogSynthesizer, NESynth and iShred, plus photography software including a stop motion app and 5d2 (a remote for the Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR used for a few of the shots) and, of course, a laptop, PixieTea (and crew) created this 3:39 music video named "ABCD Said" from the ground up. For the skeptics in the house, apparently the story was confirmed by local media. And yes, the vocals were most probably recorded through a standalone mic.
Truly, those of us failing to create captivating media in this day and age are either uncreative or just lazy. The tools are there, and they aren't even all that expensive. [chinaSMACK]
iKat Augmented Reality App Works Without Real-World Prompt [Apps]
Apart from the name—which I personally approve of very much—Zenitum's iKat app has another cool edge to it. It's (we think) the first augmented reality phone app to work without a marker, or real-world prompt.
The app itself is pretty basic, just a cartoon-like pet running around on whatever surface you aim the phone at. Zenitum, the South Korean company behind iKat, says the app has to recognize an environment to work:
"Based on Zenitum's D-Track engine, we are working on markerless mobile augmented reality application, iKat. You are breeding a virtual kitten on the phone. The kitten can be mixed into real world using AR. Since no markers or image targets are needed, you need to recognize the space in front of the camera for creating the appropriate space for your kitten."
Here's the app working:
It's all built using Zenitum's D-Track software, which is explained in this video below:
iKat is a neat stepping stone for augmented reality, and while the app itself doesn't do much, I'm sure Zenitum will be expanding their technology for further use. [Zenitum via Recombu]
iPhone Tweet Defense Slaughters Zombies With Witticisms [IPhone Apps]
The premise of Tweet Defense is simple: The more you tweet and the more Twitter followers you gain, the stronger your tower defenses will be. Clever, though hopefully RT bonuses will come in the future. $1. [iTunes via Kotaku]
Air Video, the Best iPhone Video Streamer $3 Can Buy [Lifechanger]
Media streamers aren't exactly new, but there's another entrant to the field that works so simply and easily it should be nearly mandatory for any iPhone user. It's called Air Video—and it's only three bucks.
Here's the scenario: I've got a NAS with about a terabyte or so of video sitting on my network. Some torrented files, a lot of DVD rips I made myself, a fair amount of random Xvid and MKV files I've kept for years, and quite a few h.264 MPGs that I encoded of my own work.
Now, getting videos to an iPhone is relatively easy—if you want to convert them to h.264. Toss the file into Handbrake, fiddle with a few settings, and copy the converted file into iTunes to be synced to your iPhone.
Problem is, you've got to wait for the video to be converted. Then wait for it to copy to your phone. Then hope you have enough space to store it. Then delete it when you're done.
The natural solution, of course, is streaming. And several nice applications have been written that make that possible, including Orb and (which will also stream live TV if your PC has a tuner), Tversity (which can also stream to Xbox, PS3, and even DirecTV boxes). But Orb is $10; TVersity Pro is $40.
Air Video is $3. And it's so dead simple to set up that I didn't quite believe it had actually worked.
I downloaded the Air Video server software to my first-generation unibody MacBook Pro, pointed it at a local folder full of video, and activated it. (It's also available for Windows.) Then I opened up the Air Video iPhone app to find a simple directory listing. Within about three minutes from first discovering Air Video I was watching a 720p episode of a television program on my iPhone, streaming over my local Wi-Fi network.
Then I pointed the Air Video server at my NAS, suspecting that something would snag. My laptop wouldn't have the CPU power to convert the video in time. My 801.11N network would get clogged. But nope—Air Video happily chugged away, sending a real-time stream of my videos right to my phone.
I even tried watching a 13GB 1080p rip from the NAS. (Of a Blu-ray I own, thank you very much.) It worked—mostly. Air Video lost the stream occasionally, pushing the stream back in chunks as it rebuffered. Considering my laptop chokes on that file even when it's sitting on its own hard disk, I am not surprised.
Perhaps it shouldn't impress me as much as it does, but it completely changed the way I think about my media library and my iPhone. I already sleep with my iPhone at my side. And when the iPad arrives, I suspect it'll be on the nightstand, too. Now every movie or television show I have sitting around will be ready to watch in just about ten seconds.
Air Video manages to be both extremely simple to use, while extremely powerful for the settings tweaker.
If a video is encoded in h.264, a format which the iPhone can play natively, Air Video simply streams it. If not, you can "Play with Live Conversion", which uses the ffmpeg library on your Mac or PC to convert the file in real-time. (Provided your machine is fast enough. Most newer computers should be able to handle that just fine.) You can also tell Air Video to do a permanent conversion of the file to a h.264, although the real-time streaming works so well I can't imagine you'd find the need to do so very often.
There are tons of conversion settings that can be fiddled with, as well as different bit rates for streaming. But the default settings and guesstimates made by Air Video work so well, I haven't yet felt the need to touch them.
You can even stream outside your network if you turn on the "experimental" Remote setting. Air Video will generate a ten-digit PIN that you punch into the iPhone app which allows it to communicate with the Air Video server even when you're away from your home network. (I suspect it is doing some sort of simple DNS-like passing of your external IP to the company's servers, although I have not investigated this.) The takeaway is that you can watch all your movies even away from home, even over 3G. Again, this isn't a brand new idea, but to have it all work so effortlessly in a $3 app is. (There is also a free version that won't display all your files at once that works perfectly, should you want to test it first.)
I've been toying with the idea of selling my HDTV for a while. I use it, but could live without it. I've barely been playing console games at all over the last few months, using the TV mostly as a giant monitor connected to a Mac Mini that serves as a home theater PC. I'd been considering replacing it with an iPad, as silly as that might seem, simply because I live alone and rarely watch movies and such with guests.
I don't know if I'll sell the TV and the Mac Mini or not, but Air Video has made me realize that if I wanted to, I could get the same functionality on an iPad. I'll never be without my video library again. Not bad for three bucks. [iTunes]
Comcast's Latest iPhone App Manages Your DVR From Anywhere [Comcast]
Comcast is fairly evil, to be sure. But if they're doing one thing right, it's the latest version of their free iPhone app, Comcast Mobile App 2.0.
In this walkthrough, you'll see that not only can you set recordings from your iPhone, but you can do so over the multiple DVRs that you may have in your house. (Note: so far, this function is only available in select areas.) Meanwhile, everyone receives new push notifications reminding you to watch or record your favorite shows...which admittedly sounds a bit useless in the DVR era.
If you're watching the clip, skip about 20 seconds in to get to the meat of it. (Not that Scott the Comcast guy doesn't seem very nice.) [iTunes via Comcast Blog Thanks Simon!]
BTW, Wi-Fi Scanner Apps Were Begging to Get Banned by Apple [App Store]
Also shitcanned by Apple in the Great App Store Purge of 2010: Wi-Fi scanning apps. The reason being that they used private frameworks to access wireless info. While some of these apps might've been useful, especially the ones with GPS functionality to locate hotspots, using private frameworks is kinda like painting a big "ban me" target on your back, even if you do slip through the approval process. [Softpedia via MaximumPC via DVICE]
Apple's Sexy App Purge Was Just the Beginning [App Store]
The Great App Store Purge of 2010 continues. They came for the sexy apps, and other apps said nothing. Now, according to some developers, they're coming for pre-fabbed apps—like RSS apps built using ready-set-go templates from app-building services.
Specifically, they're blocking new submissions of apps that are basically just re-packaged RSS feeds or business cards. What makes this purge not-at-all outrageous is that they're not clearing out apps they've already approved, and they're at least telling app-building services like AppMakr what they need to change in order to make themselves worthy of the App Store: adding features like push notifications, offline access and in-app purchases.
They're pushing developers to make their apps useful and different, in other words, rather than taking up virtual shelf space for goods that could be web apps. If Apple's going to be policing App Store submissions for more than mere maliciousness—which seems like it's going to be the case for the immediate future—it's the kind of policing you'd want them to do, at least in theory. A cookie-cutter app is a cookie-cutter app, a determination that's far less inscrutable than the process to decide what's too prurient to be sold.
But it's clear now that the sex app purge was apparently just the beginning of a larger process to clean up the App Store. Apple's eminently concerned with the App Store's perception as a huckster-y bazaar, and the reflection of that image upon the Apple brand itself. Tacky, shitty apps populating the store are inevitably stains on that glossy Apple logo, and Apple's just starting to wipe them up. The purge will burn hotter before it's over. [TechCrunch]