Phil Schiller Responds to App Store Dictionary Censoring

This is the part I'm most worried about:

As is clear from the screenshots, Qingwen doesn’t bombard you with words like “cock” and “penis” the moment you start it up. No, the Apple employee who took those screenshots specifically searched for those words. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the same thing as opening a website that contains swear words (like the page you’re reading, for instance) on the iPhone. If they don’t want Qingwen on the iPhone because it can show you “objectionable material”, then why allow Safari, Mail, YouTube and pretty much any other app, which can easily show you all sorts of even more “objectionable material”?

I don't like the idea that reviewers are doing their best to try and make my apps fail approval. That comes across to me as a developer that Apple doesn't want me to succeed. And based on how they have been treating developers lately, that definitely seems to be the case.

At the very least, this shows that the execs at Apple at least know about the problem. I know it's hard to miss, but I honestly thought they could have not heard about these issues by now. It's that bad. The utter silence that their corporate culture encourages is creating a horrible situation for them and for us. They need to realize that the traditional ways of secrecy and black boxing that normally works for other areas of their business is not going to work here.

How can a person on one hand say "Apple did not reject this developer’s application for including references to common swear words" and on that other hand know that the app was being banned because they wanted a 17+ rating due to the availability, to quote the article, of the words "shit, fuck, and cunt, specifically." Are not the former common swear words, and is not the restriction of material from wider audiences censorship?

The problem that I see is that Apple has no business being in the censorship or rating business period. Sure there are "business reasons" to perform these roles, but they are antithetical to a free society.

The free market answer would be, if you don't like it don't buy an iPhone. That's great, but as technology marches forward there can only be a finite number of companies with the skills and resources to create smart phones, Apple being one of the nicest offerings. This concern will probably never effect enough consumers for this to ever hurt Apple's bottom line, and so they will never feel a free market pressure to change their behavior.

A sort of net neutrality type of guarantee must be struck here, market forces will not prevail because this simply isn't an issue enough people care about. Rights are being infringed however and that must be addressed.

I don't think that a rating system is antithetical to a free society. It is reasonable for consumers to want to know if there is material they would consider objectionable in a product, and it is reasonable for businesses to provide this information. A problem that Apple does have is that they appear to be applying standards for what might be considered objectionable in inconsistent ways.

They essentially said "ohh, we don't mind the 'swear' words, just the really bad ones"

Fuck that. It is exactly the same thing, but the lexicon has evolved.