Whither Eucalyptus?

Posted on May 21, 2009

Update

The situation has now been resolved. Read more in my later blog entry.

Original Post

If you’re wondering why Eucalyptus is not yet available, it’s currently in the state of being ‘rejected’ for distribution on the iPhone App Store. This is due to the fact that it’s possible, after explicitly searching for them, to find, download from the Internet, and then read texts that Apple deems ‘objectionable’. The example they have given me is a Victorian text-only translation of the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana. For the full background, a log of my communications with Apple is below.

To give a bit of background about Eucalyptus itself, it doesn’t ‘contain’ books any more than a newly bought iPod ‘contains’ songs. It provides an easy-to-use way to find and download classic books, then presents them a beautiful, readable (I would say the most beautiful, and most readable, but I’m biased of course) way. Check out the videos at eucalyptusapp.com if you haven’t seen them. The books are all text-only, and are directly downloaded from the archives of the well-respected Project Gutenberg.

The exact book (the Kama Sutra) that Apple considers the ability to read ‘objectionable’ is freely available on the iPhone in many ways already. You can find it through Safari or the Google app of course, but it is also easily available via other book reading apps. You can get it easily via eReader, though the search process is handled by launching a third-party site in Safari, with the download and viewing taking place in eReader. Stanza offers up multiple versions, some with illustrated covers. Amazon’s Kindle app, the latest version of which was approved by Apple this week, offers multiple versions too - although it does charge from 80¢ to $10 per book - and you again purchase via Safari before Kindle downloads the book.

I am at a loss to explain why Eucalyptus is being treated differently than these applications by Apple. I’m also frankly amazed that they would suggest I should be manually censoring content that is being downloaded from the public Internet - classic, even ancient, books, no less.

To digress a little for a moment, it especially amazes me that this is happening to Eucalyptus - a $9.99 app that allows you to download text-only classic books - given the huge volume of what is arguably soft-core porn imagery that’s now available in apps on the store. Just search for “sex” to see what I mean (or even “Kama Sutra” - you’ll find “SlideHer Tera Patrick”, the description of which features the classy line, “Almost X rated, it’s not porn.”) I do, however, accept that this could be seen as a consistent policy - even if it does seem morally dubious to me. Honestly though, is a 14 year old looking for something illicit more likely to download a free bikini girls app, or pay $9.99 for a book reading app, search explicitly for the Kama Sutra, then wade through Victorian prose trying to find the ‘good bits’?

Anyway - back to the issue directly at hand. For all I know, it could just be that I was unlucky enough to have Euclyptus assigned to an over-zealous reviewer. If Apple responded to attempts at communication, it’s possible we could have resolved this quickly, even if it took a call-center style “can I please speak to your manager”, but they do not.

A commentary

I’m going to talk a bit about my personal frustrations here - you can skip this part if you’re not interested in emotional impact, or would class further complaints as whining.

I suspect that no-one at Apple knows how genuinely torturous the app store approval process is for developers personally after a rejection. When they hold the key to the only distribution pipe for something you’ve spent a lot of your time on - in my case a year - something you’re hoping could provide you with a livelihood - and polite email enquiries are not replied to - not even with an autoresponder, it is extremely frustrating. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as powerless in my life (and I’ve had to deal with US immigration authorities…). I think anyone that knows me would confirm that I’m a very level-headed person, but this is the only thing in my adult life I can recall losing sleep over (although perhaps that’s also a consequence of being otherwise lucky in life so far).

I can certainly appreciate that Apple probably has to deal with some very difficult and unreasonable developers, but that’s not a reason to lock all others out of any form of conversation. I am sure they could do a lot to improve developers’ view of the process if they were just a little more outwardly friendly. There’s a lot they could do without even spending significant money - how much would an estimate of time remaining until review cost to implement? Or a policy of responding to at least one email after a rejection?

If it wasn’t for their dominant market share, I suspect that they would have to be a lot more friendly to attract developers to the platform. As it is, I guess I just have to hope that they realise the emotional distress they’re causing (and I haven’t even mentioned the other flaws of the process, like the inability to specify when your application will go on sale if you want it to appear in the ‘new’ application lists).

The full background

Below, identifying details (email addresses and reference numbers) have been removed from the emails originating from Apple.

Eucalyptus was first submitted to Apple on the 27th of April. On the the 3rd of May, I received the first rejection - for misusing the ‘Contacts’ and ‘Bookmarks’ icons to represent ‘Authors’ and ‘Books’. I don’t really have complaints about this - Apple’s been fairly (though not entirely) consistent about enforcing the use of standard icons for their narrowly defined purposes, and I really should have known better. I resubmitted with new icons - the ones now on display in the tab bar in the videos at eucalyptusapp.com, and expected smooth sailing.

A week later, on the 10th of May, I got this email:

Dear James, Thank you for submitting Eucalyptus — classic books, to go. to the App Store. We’ve reviewed Eucalyptus — classic books, to go. and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it contains inappropriate sexual content and is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states: “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.” Please view the attached screenshot for further information. If you believe that you can make the necessary changes so that Eucalyptus — classic books, to go. does not violate the iPhone SDK Agreement, we encourage you to do so and resubmit it for review.

It was accompanied by this image:

Search showing result for Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana

I immediately replied:

Hello, I received the email quoted below today. Eucalyptus does not, as you say it does, “contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind”, it simply provides an interface for searching an internet archive of classic books. The screenshot in question was taken after manually searching specifically for the phrase in the screenshot. The ‘content’ is not not ‘included’ in the application, or specifically controlled by me. The same content could be found by searching at http://gutenberg.org/ with Safari, or by searching with the Google application, also available on the store. I would appreciate a reply to this email, I trust that this is an error made in good faith. Thanks, James Montgomerie

I also re-submitted Eucalyptus to Apple, on the advice of another developer who had previously been advised by Apple to resubmit an app when it was erroneously rejected because after a binary is in the ‘rejected’ state it ‘cannot’ be accepted. If this was the case, it seemed wiser to do it sooner rather than later if a place in the queue was at stake.

I received no reply at all to my email, so on the 13th of May (three business days later), I sent another email:

I have received no reply to the email quoted below, or confirmation of reception. Could you please confirm that you have received this?

The next day (14th of May), I received this - to me it looks like an automated email, but I guess it could have been sent by a human:

Your application, Eucalyptus — classic books, to go, is requiring unexpected additional time for review. We apologize for the delay, and will update you with further status as soon as we are able. Thank you for your patience.

On the 18th of May, I sent:

Hello, Can you supply any more details on this delay? Is there anything further you need from me, or questions I could answer? Thanks, James Montgomerie.

Again, no response.

Yesterday (20th May), I received this:

We’ve received your application inquiry. Each app submitted to Apple has different capabilities, features, and complexity, which means that individual review times vary. Once the application review process has been completed, you will receive an email notification. Note: If you self-reject a binary and upload a new one, the application review process is reset and starts from the beginning. Therefore, we strongly recommend that any quality assurance testing is performed prior to submitting the app. While we cannot respond to every app submission inquiry, if we encounter any issues or need additional information you will be contacted. If you wish to check the status of your application, you can do so by visiting iTunes Connect .

This was shortly followed by another email (note that there is still no reference to the points I brought up in my original reply):

Dear Mr. Montgomerie, Thank you for submitting Eucalyptus — classic books, to go to the App Store. We’ve reviewed Eucalyptus — classic books, to go and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store at this time because it contains explicit content which is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states: “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.” Please view the attached screenshots for examples in regards to the objectionable content. Parental Controls have been announced for iPhone OS 3.0. It would be appropriate to resubmit your application for review once this feature is available.

The screenshots attached were:

Page from Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana Page from Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana

I quickly replied with:

Might you reconsider this decision? I appreciate the meaning behind this. The very same text, however, is accessible via Safari (at www.gutenberg.org, the scholarly archive that Eucalyptus directly downloads its books from), for example. The same book is also available in other existing iPhone applications - ‘Stanza’ provides access to multiple versions, some with illustrations. In either of these examples, the content is no harder to find than it is with Eucalyptus - it requires a specific manual search. Thanks - hope to hear back soon, James Montgomerie.

And have not received a reply.

What I’m doing now

I’m afraid I’ve currently decided to sell my soul, or at least rent it out for a while, and manually block the Kama Sutra from appearing in Eucalyptus. It may become accessible again in a later version of Eucalyptus when Parental Controls become available. If someone at Apple would like to contact me to let me know that this is unnecessary, and that Eucalyptus will now be treated the same way as other iPhone apps, I would be very happy to hear from them.

What can you do? I suspect not much. At the risk of introducing crass commercially into an otherwise honorable blog post, you could perhaps go to eucalyptusapp.com and sign up to be notified by email when Eucalyptus is released (with or without access to ‘objectionable’ texts) - or follow @eucalyptusapp on Twitter for updates - and buy it when it’s available. You will, of course, be supporting the very company whose actions (and inactions) inspired this blog post by doing so, but you’ll also be supporting me, and Project Gutenberg (20% of the gross profits from Eucalyptus go them, as their license dictates).

Thanks for reading. It feels good to get this off my chest after keeping quiet for so long.

Update

I’ve now received another email from Apple (an hour and a half after posting the entry above). I’m not sure whether it’s more polite to post it here or not, so I’ve erred on the side of being transparent. I hope this doesn’t turn into a soap opera of updates.

Dear Mr. Montgomerie, Thank you for submitting Eucalyptus — classic books, to go to the App Store. Your iPhone application to the App Store at this time because it contains explicit content which is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement. It would be appropriate to remove this particular section in your application due to: “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.”

I have replied:

I am unsure what you mean by “remove this particular section”. Eucalyptus provides a search-and-download interface to a public archive of texts curated by Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org). The books are not split into ‘sections’, and not controlled by me. Even though it has meant creating a specific filter on search results, I have now submitted a new version that specifically blocks access to the Kama Sutra book you identified. Is this what you mean? James.