Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice-president for worldwide product marketing, gave his first signifcant interview on the App Store approval process today.
Schiller’s comments from the businessweek.com article:
- “We’ve built a store for the most part that people can trust,” he says. “You and your family and friends can download applications from the store, and for the most part they do what you’d expect, and they get onto your phone, and you get billed appropriately, and it all just works.”
- “Whatever your favorite retailer is, of course they care about the quality of products they offer,” he says. “We review the applications to make sure they work as the customers expect them to work when they download them.”
- “There have been applications submitted for approval that will steal personal data, or which are intended to help the user break the law, or which contain inappropriate content.”
- “We had to go study state and international laws about what’s legal and what isn’t, and what legal exposure that creates for Apple or the customer.” The verdict: Apps that help a user learn how to play are O.K.; those designed to help a person cheat don’t make the cut.
- “If you don’t defend your trademarks, in the end you end up not owning them.” He continues, “And sometimes other companies come to us saying they’ve seen their trademarks used in apps without permission. We see that a lot.”
- “We’ve had a lot of eyes on us,” Schiller says. “We’ve had inquiries from governments and political leaders asking us what we were doing to protect children from inappropriate content.”
You can read the whole article, here.
Last Friday, Paul Graham (well known essayist, programmer, and co-founder of Viaweb) published an interesting piece that starts off by saying: “I don’t think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don’t think they realize how much it matters that it’s broken.”
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