The Removal of AirFloat and AirFoil [from the iOS App Store]

Also, if you start trying to convince yourself that your app does not violate the guidelines because there are other apps do what you want to do, even though your intuition tells you that your app will be rejected, spend your energy elsewhere. Apple has no concept of "precedent" in making their decisions (nor should they or could they), and they make clear that the existence of another app doing what you do is not the basis for a successful appeal.

I'm not saying don't push the boundaries of the guidelines, but if you do so, understand it to be a business risk. And if Apple turns around and rejects your app, accept it as a cost of doing business on the edge, and don't act like Apple is to blame for the risk you took and take your sense of persecution public.

AirPlay is a strategic technology for Apple - it is going to become more and more important in the next year. Any moves Apple makes to protect this technology are first and foremost going to be motivated by ensuring the best, most consistent possible experience for the end user - their interests rest with the whole device ecology and how those devices interact. The motivation is not crushing third-party implementations because they don't want to compete with them or because they want licensing fees (which are trivial to them) - it is because they don't want hacked implementations screwing up the end-user experience, especially for non-geeks.

He says: "But then something remarkable happened. Apple approved Air Speakers – an app that enabled you to stream audio to your iOS device from iTunes and iOS devices. Using the private key of the AirPort Express. Sadly it was a horrible app. Synchronization wasn’t even implemented, so the audio was hopelessly out of sync, when sending audio to multiple devices."

I believe this is why Apple requires you license AirPlay. Not so they can make a quick buck (I'm sure the license fees are trivial to Apple), but so they can make sure things that work with AirPlay don't behave as the author claims the AirSpeakers app does.

They later claim that AirPlay implemented the key to stop piracy; "The encrypted stream was initially implemented in order to protect the transfer of DRM-encrypted iTunes Music Store audio content," but doesn't back this statement up. I think they implemented the key requirement to enforce their licensing. I can't back this up either, other than it explains Apple's actions better than his theory. The licensing isn't there as a profit center, but to give them some quality control so that AirPlay doesn't get a bad reputation for being difficult to use or unreliable.

The thing that doesn't make sense is that supposedly Apple rejected this for using private APIs. This doesn't sound like the case.

It'd be interesting to know what the AirPlay licensing terms are like, and whether or not the AirFloat developer or Rogue Amoeba approached Apple to license AirPlay (I'll guess no).