“Freelance journalist and data artist Josh Begley has been methodically recording U.S. military drone activity for years,” Jack Smith IV reports for Tech.Mic. “Every week or so — whenever the strikes occur — Begley will post a news story from the @dronestream Twitter account, identifying when and where drone strikes have occurred before feeding the results into an app called Metadata+.”
“But on Sunday, Dronestream tweeted that Metadata+, which sends out push notifications every time there is a U.S. drone strike, had been removed from the App Store after seven months of being openly available,” Smith reports. “Begley will still update followers about the drone strikes via his Twitter account. However, the app’s removal is sudden and inexplicable; it was accepted by the App Store after five attempts.”
“The tech giant has also taken down educational apps that depicted the Confederate Flag in its historical context. All while allowing for apps that include violence and graphic depictions of war, like Hitman: Sniper and Zynga’s Empires and Allies,” Smith reports. “Then again, those apps all include in-app purchases from which Apple collects revenue. And none of them is offensive to the United States government.”
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“In 2012, Begley made an iOS companion app for the Twitter stream that would provide push notifications to keep you abreast of drone attacks around the world (also known as ‘news’), and Apple rejected it five times for being ‘not useful or entertaining enough’ and too narrow in focus,” Sam Biddle reports for Gawker. “Finally, Begley resubmitted the Dronestream app under an unrelated name (‘Metadata+’) and it was approved without hesitation. That was last year.”
Biddle reports, “Over the weekend, Metadata+ users received a push notification from the App Store to alert them that the software had been pulled: ‘Apple has removed Metadata+ from the App Store due to ‘excessively crude or objectionable content.’ Thank you.'”
Biddle writes, “It’s hard to imagine what about national security news presented in text format could be considered ‘crude’ (let alone ‘excessively’ so), and while the idea of extrajudicial killings is objectionable, aggregated news of it happening isn’t.”
“But he also has a backup—an app called ‘Ephemeral’ provides all the drone news functionality of Metadata+, but has evaded Apple’s scrutiny because its App Store entry consists of nothing but placeholder art and text. That the following would get a thumbs up from Apple after Begley was turned down so many times before tells you much about how the company operates,” Biddle reports. “Download it here before the craven Cupertino decency squad deems it objectionable.”
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MacDailyNews Take: The continued arbitrariness of Apple’s App Store reviewers’ decision-making process continues to perplex.