Phil Schiller of Apple responded to John Gruber after Gruber’s piece about Apple censoring Ninjawords — an iPhone dictionary app — made the rounds Tuesday.
Schiller:
You are correct that the Ninjawords application should not have needed to be censored while also receiving a 17+ rating, but that was a result of the developers’ actions, not Apple’s. I believe that the Apple app review team’s original recommendation to the developer to submit the Ninjawords application, without censoring it, to the App Store once parental controls was implemented would have been the best course of action for all; Wiktionary.org is an open, ever-changing resource and filtering the content does not seem reasonable or necessary.
And Gruber:
What Matchstick could have done was wait for iPhone OS 3.0 and publish the app with a 17+ rating. What they wanted to do, though, was ship their app as soon as possible. Hence Matchstick’s decision to begin filtering out the words which the App Store reviewers found objectionable. As Matchstick’s Phil Crosby told me via email last night, “17+ ratings were not available when we launched, which means at that time, it was simply not possible for our dictionary to be on the App Store without being censored. Given the options of censoring or sitting on the side lines while our competitors ate our lunch, we chose to launch.”