French minister threatens EU action over Apple’s removal of Paris-based AppGratis from App Store

“Last Friday, Apple banned AppGratis – which lets users discover applications for free – for not respecting its guidelines. AppGratis says it has 12 million users worldwide and generated 2012 revenue of 9 million euros,” Reuters reports.

“During a visit to AppGratis publisher iMediapp, French junior minister for digital economy Fleur Pellerin called Apple’s decision “extremely brutal and unilateral,” Reuters reports. “This behaviour is not worthy of a company of this size,’ Pellerin said.”

Reuters reports, “She added that certain Internet companies were guilty of ‘repeated abusive behaviour’ and said she would ask the European Commission and EU member states to better regulate digital platforms, search engines and social media. In an email to Reuters, Apple said it had had a discussion with AppGratis before removing it from its platform and that the company had disregarded its technical specifications.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Imbécile.

Related articles:
AppGratis CEO: The day Apple pulled us from their App Store, ‘I almost fainted’ – April 9, 2013
Apple pulls AppGratis from App Store two months after it raised $13.5 million in funding – April 8, 2013

41 Comments

    1. The French government’s budget presented (September, 2012), which is imposing a 75 percent tax rate for income exceeding 1 million euros ($1.39 million), is expected to inspire a number of wealthy French to move their residency to other countries. Even Jerry Lewis couldn’t afford to live there.

  1. I am a little slow here – Apple reviews an app and finds that it doesn’t meet guidelines set out in the contracts it has with developers who submit apps, and when it yanques the app, a French minister has a fit? Yet if I let some cheese go bad in my basement for a couple of years and then sell it as “Jeff’s Roquefort” the French will come screaming at me for violating some trade agreement that prevents anyone from calling cheese with green mold “roquefort.”

    And would someone please tell me why so many products made and packaged in the USA for Americans have French descriptions and weights printed on them? A bag of lettuce has to be labeled in French fercrisakes? My box of Avery mailing labels? My bottle of Leinenkugel’s beer?

    My attitude is for Apple to tell them to STFU and quit whining. It’s Apple’s store and Apple can grant or deny permission to sell whatever products it damned well pleases.

    As Jean-Louis Gassee once astutely observed about a competitor: He is péter plus haut que son cul.

      1. actually NOT that many speak the old French of Canada — MacSmiley.

        It’s just recognized as the Nations second language.

        Yet the entire country must comply with bilingualized posters, advertising, packaging etc. – though the same does not occur in Quebec as they are more unilingual. Go figure?

    1. …lettuce has to be labeled in French fercrisakes?
      There are many French-speaking Canadians. Maybe they are more likely to buy our lettuce if there is information in their own language? They may even have legal rights to product information in their native language.

    2. How American to be monolingual, what excellence it demonstrates..

      Did it ever occur to you it was labeled in multiple languages because it is also exported and by having one wrapper in multiple languages the lettuce manufacturer has gained efficiency and reduced cost?

      Now head-on back to your mouth-breathing, nascar watching, trailer dwelling life, slow-one…

      1. [sigh]

        You missed the point entirely. I’m not going to play the game of rebuttal with appeals to authority or my multicultural background or how many languages I try to speak. That would be pointless.

        I just think it stinks when a private company does what it is perfectly within its rights to do, and gets shit upon by someone speaking from his ministry who thinks that what that private company has done is somehow illegal and wants to take punitive measures.

        I’ll admit that I got carried away by mentioning the oddity of multilingual package labeling. I will not apologize for that because I think such things are unnecessary for items that proudly display, “Grown in Ohio for Ohioans” and because the lettuce gets shipped across state line, there has to be a French translation.

  2. There’s more to this I believe. AppGratis was heavily recruiting workers for a Paris office. I checked their jobs postings and there’s a ton of jobs being offered there.

    So ya, France was probably excited to have some Silicon Valley guys setting up out there and are now pissed at Apple… even though at the end of the day… it’s just a damn phone App and the world will go on. And AppGratis broke the rules.

  3. Now I see why the English still have issues with the French, and they are right.

    The French cry and talk a big talk but at the end of the day they still are the little white Flag waivers of WWII, you think after all that time they would learn something.

    GET OVER IT

  4. Apple does indeed have its rules – but they seem to be selectively enforced. Why does AppGratis, which could be considered to be a legitimate news source (an app being given away could very easily be considered newsworthy), yet some apps that I have paid good money for bombard me with popups imploring me to purchase yet another app? It seems to me that notifying me of the change in status of a given app and asking me to spend money on an app are two very different things (the first being news, the second being marketing), but I wonder how the first is considered to be “promotion of another app” when the second is not.

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