You really couldn't make this up if your tried very hard indeed. The ongoing saga which is best summed up as 'what will Apple ban today' has just got stranger than ever. Apparently all BitTorrent iPhone apps are toxic, as is the notion of superimposing your own face upon that of Jesus, not to mention a Twitter application that was refused a place in the app store because Twitter was down for maintenance when the Apple people tested it.
The BitTorrent ban is an odd one. Although BitTorrent applications per se are not illegal, and the protocol itself is put to perfectly legal use by many organisations, Apple has apparently determined that such applications are "often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights" and so has "chosen to not publish this type of application to the App Store." The application which provoked all of this being something called DriveTrain which can remotely control Mac BitTorrent Transmission reviews.
Perhaps the decision not to put Jesus on the Jesus phone is more understandable, as anything that causes religious offence is always going to be something of a hot potato. The Me So Holy app would let users superimpose their own face upon those of religious figures, in much the same way as an existing app allows users to put their faces on animals for example. Is Apple running scared of anything that might be in the slightest bit controversial then? Well, you might think not given that it initially allowed a 'game' which required the iPhone user to shake a baby to death in order to get it to stop crying, although the app was later withdrawn once the media got hold of the story.
At least the silliness that existed regarding the Nine Inch Nails app, or rather the use of bad language in a song within the application, is now over. Apple removed the app from sale after the bad language was reported, despite being quite happy to sell that exact same song on iTunes.
My favourite bit of Apple madness, though, has to be the strange case of the Tweetspotter rejection. According to the developer, Kuan Yong, the app was rejected because it did not "achieve the core functionality" described in the marketing materials. It would appear that it did not connect to Twitter when being tested. Unsurprisingly, given that it seems it was being tested when Twitter was down for scheduled maintenance.
Apple has enough problems applying common sense to the application approval process, without throwing a new curve-ball at developers in the shape of the possibility of rejection if a third party API is unavailable for whatever reason at the specific time of testing.