Apple demands a certain level of control with their App Store; they don’t want something that people would be offended with on the store. With the recent addition of rating system to the store, we thought that they would be a little more lenient to Apps, essentially opening it up to some more risque titles. Yet the system put in place is still too vague and unspecific to work:

That’s the key point to all of this: The ratings range from making no sense to having way too much gray area. Apple is expecting developers to rate their apps correctly, but if it simply doesn’t allow anything in the last two categories to get through, of course those developers are going to wiggle their apps into the “safe” categories. Any why shouldn’t they? A lot of those definitions appear to be the exact same. And that’s probably why we’re seeing a lot of apps that aren’t supposed to get through, slip through the system.

Flat out: The system is broken.

The situation Apple puts developers in with the App Store approval process is hell. Even as consumers, the prospect of being restricted to the whims and tastes of tight Apple reviewers is sad. This is the downside to a closed model: we’re dependent on one gatekeeper to access an entire world of applications; if the gatekeeper sucks, everyone in the ecosystem gets screwed.

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