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The story of the Ninjawords iPhone app has been all over the blogs lately, and for good reason.  Why should a dictionary app have censored words on top of the 17+ rating?  Well, it would be because the developer put the cart before the horse so to speak.  They submitted the app before 3.0 was released and they were told to wait for 3.0 and resubmit for the parental control features.  They wanted the app released as soon as possible, so they filtered out some words, resubmitted, and got published to the App Store.  However, now that 3.0 is out and parental controls work, this app was tagged with the 17+ rating.  I’m assuming that they should be able to issue an update removing the censors and it should get pushed through without issue.

The more important part of this whole fallout is that our good buddy Phil Schiller has officially chimed in on this whole thing.  He replied to John Gruber’s article from Tuesday and with Phil’s permission, parts of the letter were republished today on this blog.  It is a fairly interesting read since Gruber got first hand accounts from both Apple and Matchstick Software.  Phil certainly sounds sincere when he says that “…if we err we intend to learn and quickly improve.”  I hope that this means we’ll see a 180° turnaround from the App Store team and we can get a clear, consistent set of rules so that we don’t drive away the big developers such as EA or Gameloft or even Google (it may be too late for the last one though).  Equally important is that we make sure that the small dev teams such as Matchstick Software, The Iconfactory, or the budding developers such as myself who can’t even afford a MacBook but want to develop for the platform desperately.

Daring Fireball