Another day, another capricious decision by Apple to pull a fairly innocuous application. This time it’s BoxOffice, a diabolical system for finding and displaying local movie times. Quoth the developers at Metasyntactic:
Apple pulled the app yesterday without giving my any notification that they were doing it, or what their justification was for removing it.
I’ve tried to contact them about the issue, but it’s been a complete dead end. If anyone has a useful contact number for apple, please let me know.
I’m in regular contact with all my data providers, and none of them have had an issue with my app. Indeed, the response was the exact opposite. They like my app and have even asked if i would do custom application work for them in the future. Furthermore, all the data i use is licensed by the owners as ‘free for non commercial use’. i.e. precisely what BoxOffice is.
So i’m stuck here not knowing what has happened, or what i can do about it. If any of you have any ideas, please let me know. You can respond here, but i’d actually appreciate a reply at cyrusn@stwing.upenn.edu since i probably won’t check back here that often.
What’s delightful about this whole thing is the random nature of the pulls and reinstatements. Clearly someone at Apple is freaking out every five minutes. I suspect it’s either an overly literalist lawyer (“This game involves placing blocks in a row! The Bricklayers Local 104 in Oakland will sue us for using scab labor!”) or an overly literalist programmer has written a Perl script to scan submitted code for things she considers no-nos.