Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you’re going to have to cancel your mobile drone tracking plans for Labor Day weekend. It was a really fun plan, I know. Pull out the lawn chairs, find a sunny spot in the grass — beer in one hand, iPhone in the other — and open up your new Drones+ app. When the CIA sends one of their Predators or Reapers or whatever into mountains of Pakistan or Yemen or Somalia to drop some bombs on some terrorists, you get a push notification and a text message-like report on where the drone hit, how many it killed, etc. You can even look at a Google Map of the attacked area. But alas, Apple has rejected Drones+ from the App Store for the third time. Apparently, keeping tabs on our nation’s soldiers and spies is a “crude and objectionable” thing to do.
Josh Begley, the app’s developer, just doesn’t get it. The first time Apple rejected Drones+, it bluntly cited some functionality concerns. It was “not useful” enough. The second time was more vague, something to do with a corporate logo in the app. The third time, though, Apple just cut to the chase. “We found that your app contains content that many audiences would find objectionable, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines,” the company said in an email to the New York-based developer.
