Developer beat App Store censors with Easter Egg

There’s really no limit to what a determined developer can get away with, and “doing the nasty” (so to speak) doesn’t require any hacking whatsoever. Instead, bake porn or naughty words or even dangerous software exploits right into an iPhone app and sneak it right under Apple’s nose with little chance of getting caught (unless you confess).

Wired reports on how a little sleight of hand by a legitimate iPhone developer is helped him get around Apple’s largely absurd and hugely arbitrary (not to mention unpublished) rules regarding obscenity, profanity and other naughty, naughty stuff.

“It’s almost impossible for Apple to see if there’s an Easter egg because they can’t really see the source code,” said iPhone developer Jelle Prins, whose Lyrics (iTunes, $1.99) allows users access to profanity laced lyrics. “In theory, a developer could make a simple Easter egg [i.e. hidden eye candy or software features] in their app and provide a user with whatever content they want.”

Apple initially rejected Jelle Prins’ iPhone app, which displays the words to songs stored in the device’s music library. When he submitted his software for approval, Apple’s censors said Lyrics could be used to view profanity laced lyrics and threw it back to him for a fix. However, rather than publicly piss and moan (i.e. as many whinging devs have done), he installed both the required profanity filter and an Easter Egg inside Lyrics (i.e. go to the About screen, swipe down three times and then turn off the filter) that allows users to disable it.

Interestingly, Apple has apparently read the Wired write up, realized they’ve been had and pulled Prins’ software from the App Store, which now says that Lyrics “…is currently not available in the US store.”

A priest and an App Store censor walk into a bar…

Regardless of the fact that Wired and Prins have let the Easter Egg cat out of the bag, there’s no practical way for Apple to find Easter Eggs inside iPhone apps—they just don’t have the personnel or time to be that thorough. So, why has Apple (apparently) punished Prins yet again for making Lyrics fully functional? Because they could and likely felt they had to.

Should they have? Well, the world might just have been a slightly better place if they had chosen to ignore this latest “provocation”…

What’s your take?

See also:
— NIN’s Reznor on effing eff bomb rant over effing App Store …
— NIN iPhone app gets Apple’s blessing
— AT&T to finally allow iPhone connection tethering

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