Gruber on Ninjawords’ Censorship by Apple

First off, I love the Ninjawords online dictionary, and have for some time, since I first discovered it through Wordie.

This story, however, is outrageous. The gist is that the Ninjawords developers had to remove “objectionable content” from their dictionary in order to get it published in the App Store, removing words like “ass” and “snatch.”

Take a moment to breathe that in. Apple. Censored. A dictionary.

The situation with the App Store in general seems to be showing a particularly ugly side to Apple, that I would have never expected to see so fully a year or more ago. I don’t use an iPhone, but I was happy that they came up with a model for the App Store that seemed to be so beneficial to the little guys in software development. The App Store, in theory, makes iPhone applications compete primarily on quality, not brand recognition.

But the way Apple guards its gates is madness.