Three years ago a fun application conceived by my (then) seven-year-old daughter, was denied approval by Apple because it contained “objectionable” content. According to Apple it was in violation of the following policy:

“Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

The App Store contains a variety of Farting applications, many of which contain graphics of a more extreme nature than those of our darling Talking Poo. If you’re not looking for a Farting app, you can also select from myriad Vomit applications, some of which graphically pile up the chunks while you listen to the unpleasant sounds of retching. Despite its would-be neighbors, Talking Poo was unfortunately excluded from joining the App Store party despite spending two months trying to persuade Apple Developer Relations of its entertainment qualities.

Fast forward three years and the story continues.  My daughter (now ten) was browsing through the entertainment category yesterday and what should she come across but a Talking Poo application, called ‘Mr Poo – Kick the Talking Poo’.  Not only does this application look very similar to our rejected Talking Poo application, but it replicates much of the same functionality.  This app is by a mainstream developer and is riding high in the Entertainment category.

My daughter was rightly upset that her invention could not be published by Apple and yet a very similar application was.  I’ve seen and even experienced many examples of App Store approval process inconsistencies, but this is by far the worst because of the close similarity of the Apps even down to the name.

My call to Apple is please review all applications with a consistent set of rules, and if you later change how you interpret those rules, then go back and inform those disappointed developers.  If a developer comes to you and can demonstrate an inconsistency, then review that inconsistency and either approve the developers app or reject the other app that is in violation of those same rules.  Until you do that, then you will always be accused of acting unfairly and favoring certain developers.

The Talking Poo application is part of the best-selling Talking Character series produced by Gigabyte Solutions, which includes a Talking Cat, Talking Dog and Talking Puppy among many others.

Talking Dog is available free for a limited time from:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=300766014&mt=8ng

Gigabyte  Solutions are proud to announce the release of our latest app, Singing Cats for iPod and iPhone.

Why just listen to your iTunes library when you can have one of the Singing Cats sing it to you?

Select a tune from your iTunes library and we will sing the song out loud and hum the music for your pleasure.

Available now on the App Store.

Click here for more information

We have discovered a couple of bugs in Annoying Talking Orange version 2.2.  These are:

• Annoying Orange doesn’t repeat what you say
• The Laugh button doesn’t work

Our Talking Characters (e.g. Cat, Dog, etc) have been in the App Store for the last three years, and were the very first Talking Apps available.  These Talking Characters acted as mimes and moved their lips in sync to your voice in realtime.

Since we released the original Talking Characters, the market for Talking Apps has exploded and the majority of those apps repeat what you say.  Due to the popularity of these other apps, we received tens of emails a week complaining that our Talking Characters didn’t do what people expected.

We are delighted to announce that all the Talking Characters have now been updated to version 2 and are available on the App Store.  They will now repeat what you say and you can create and share videos of them online.

Check out the Talking Characters Here