Apple

The App Store has been a huge success for Apple and for some developers, but there have been a few hiccups along the way. Apps have made it past Apple's rigorous reviews machine only to be pulled down permanently, or have their developers required to remove key features.

Those who still have some of these apps can consider them collector's items, since they continue to work, despite not being able to be re-downloaded from the App Store. We've rounded up 10 of the most notable pulls (along with one that had to be tweaked for less functionality). Click the slideshow link below to get started.

Any we missed? Leave them in the comments.

App Store collector's items: 10 rarities (images)

Apple's App Store has been a runaway success, but it's also been mired in controversy due to the application approval process. The company, however, isn't making apologies for its stringent gatekeeping and insists it's acting in the best interest of its customers.

(Credit: Apple)

"We've built a store for the most part that people can trust," Phil Schiller, Apple senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, told BusinessWeek in an interview posted Monday. "You and your family and friends can download applications from the store, and for the most part they do what you'd expect, and they get onto your phone, and you get billed appropriately, and it all just works."

Schiller offered BusinessWeek a breakdown of app rejections. Of the applications sent back to developers, about 90 percent are due to technical issues and simply need code tweaks to make the apps work properly.

About 10 percent are rejected because they try to steal personal data or try to help someone break the law or because they contain content that Apple considers inappropriate, BusinessWeek reported.

About 1 percent are turned away for reasons that fall into gray areas, Schiller told BusinessWeek.

One of Apple's latest run-ins with a developer was over the use of Apple product images in Rogue Amoeba's audio-streaming app called Airfoil Speakers Touch. After three-and-a-half months of back and forth over an update for the already-live app, Apple is apparently going to let the company resubmit the app update with the product images intact as originally submitted. However, the ordeal has apparently soured Rogue Amoeba on future development for the App Store.

"At this time, we have no plans to return to the platform," Rogue Amoeba CEO Paul Kafasis told CNET on Monday. "Apple has corrected one small problem with their review process. But the platform as a whole still has many issues that need to be addressed before we consider it a viable place for our business to commit resources."

The App Store currently has more than 100,000 third-party applications available for download. Apple has reported more than 2 billion downloads since the online store opened in July 2008.

Apple's iPhone platform has attracted a wide range of developers, including many gaming companies over the last year. While competition in attracting developers is increasing among mobile operating system companies, it seems the performance of the App Store will keep Apple at the top of list.

French mobile gaming company Gameloft said at an investor conference on Friday that it is cutting back its investment in Android in favor of the iPhone, according to a Reuters report. Gameloft's finance director Alexandre de Rochefort said "many others" were doing the same thing, although he didn't mention the other companies by name.

Rochefort said the main reason for choosing the iPhone over Android was "due to weaknesses of Android's application store."

"It is not as neatly done as on the iPhone. Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products. On Android nobody is making significant revenue," said Rochefort.

Gameloft has more than 75 games available in the App Store and Rochefort said they sell 400 times more games for the iPhone than they do for Android.

Games are a big focus for Apple, especially with the release of its newest iPod Touch in September. It was there that Apple began comparing itself to the gaming elite like Nintendo and Sony.

Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, said during the event that the buying experience was "too expensive" and "not a lot of fun." Schiller also pointed out that, at the time, there were more than 21,000 gaming titles on the iPhone, compared to 3,600 on Nintendo, and 600 on Sony.

Earlier this month, Apple said it had more than 100,000 apps available with over two billion downloads.

Paul Kafasis

(Credit: O'Reilly)

Apple's App Store boasts more than 100,000 apps and more than 2 billion downloads, but not all of its developers are as happy as some would think. One well-respected developer decided to call it quits.

Citing his frustration with the App Store approval process, Rogue Amoeba's Paul Kafasis said on his company's blog last week that he is throwing in the towel on iPhone app development after an exasperating three-and-a-half month app approval.

(Credit: Rogue Amoeba)

"Rogue Amoeba no longer has any plans for additional iPhone applications, and updates to our existing iPhone applications will likely be rare," said Kafasis. "The iPhone platform had great promise, but that promise is not enough, so we're focusing on the Mac."

Kafasis' growing irritation with the App Store centers around an update he wanted to release for his Airfoil Speakers Touch iPhone app. The app allows users to receive audio from any Mac or Windows-based PC and the update fixed some issues with audio sync.

However, Apple rejected the update because it used images of Apple products in the app. The way Airfoil Speakers Touch works is that it shows you graphically what machine and application your audio is coming from on the host computer. If you are connected to an iMac running Safari, that's what will show up in the iPhone app.

This isn't something that Kafasis hacked together--this functionality is freely available as part of Mac OS X for developers to use. In fact, Airfoil Speakers Touch 1.0 was still in the App Store, approved by Apple, with these images.

"The only thing Apple's process was doing was preventing a needed bug-fix from reaching the hands of our mutual customers," said Kafasis.

(Credit: Rogue Amoeba)

In order to get the fixes to customers, Kafasis took out all of the offending images and replaced them with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) logo. If you tap on the logo, you will be taken to a page explaining why the images have been removed.

Kafasis is asking users to consider donating to the EFF. While the organization isn't involved with his decision to place its logo in his app, "if Apple is to change, it may take such an organization to make it happen," he said.

As a developer, Kafasis also wants users to know the frustrations they have to go through to put out software. "We wanted to ship a simple bug fix, and it took almost four months of slow replies, delays, and dithering by Apple," said Kafasis. "All the while, our buggy, and supposedly infringing version, was still available. There's no other word for that but 'broken.'"

This isn't the end of the road for Kafasis. A Mac developer for 11 years, he will re-focus his efforts back to his many popular Mac applications and continue developing for that platform.

A Mad Magazine contributor has been told by Apple that his iPhone app featuring drawings and contact information of members of the 111th Congress has been rejected because it depicts politicians in an objectionable light.

Richmond's iPhone app in action.

(Credit: Tom Richmond)

According to Tom Richmond, who wrote about his app's rejection on his personal blog, his app--dubbed Bobble Rep-111th Congress Edition--in no way should have been construed as objectionable.

Richmond said that the focus of the app was to create a "database of all the members of the United States Congress which allowed the user to find the names and contact information of their senators and congressional representative either via Zip code or by using the iPhone's GPS location services." Rather than use the politicians' individual portraits, the app depicts each senator and representative in caricature form, which Richmond drew himself. All told, the app features 540 caricatures of the politicians.

First it was Steve Jobs' health. Then it was the layoffs earlier this year. Now the Google Voice rejection. Apple's credibility is being questioned yet again.

Anyone who deals with Apple on a regular basis knows it is a company that gives information on its own terms. But now even the federal government is having problems getting a clear answer regarding Apple's rejection of the Google Voice application for the iPhone.

On July 28, Google announced that the calling and message service application had been rejected from Apple's App Store. Three days later, Google, Apple, and AT&T, the iPhone's exclusive carrier in the U.S., received inquiries from the Federal Communications Commission regarding the app's rejection. In its answer to the FCC, Apple said that the application was not rejected, but was still "under review." In Google's response--the most interesting parts redacted until Friday--it told the FCC that a series of conversations took place between Apple Senior Vice President of Marketing Phil Schiller and Google Senior Vice President of Engineering Alan Eustace during the month of July, including one on July 7, where Schiller told Eustace that Google Voice was being rejected for duplicating the phone dialing function of the iPhone.

The discrepancy between what Google said and what Apple said in their answers to the FCC, of course, leads to many more questions. In response, Apple released the following statement Friday:

"We do not agree with all of the statements made by Google in their FCC letter. Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application and we continue to discuss it with Google."

So basically we have a classic he said, she said situation between two companies known to (formerly?) enjoy a close relationship: Google says it was told the application was rejected, by one of the highest-ranking people at Apple. Apple says the app wasn't rejected. So Apple is either: a) insinuating that Eustace somehow misunderstood what Schiller said, or b) suggesting that Google is lying, or c) being picky about how it's parsing words.

Perhaps "rejected" doesn't mean the same thing to Apple as it does to everyone else. While that sounds kind of silly, quite frankly, it's not outside the realm of possibility of how Apple is thinking. Perhaps Apple is planning to formalize such a category of App Store approval status where applications are neither approved nor rejected. Other applications have languished for months, but their developers have been unclear on what has caused the delay.

It's not impossible, of course, that Google misunderstood, or is itself misleading the FCC, though it's unclear why that would be. Especially since at the point when Google initially said Google Voice was rejected by Apple, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was still sitting on Apple's board of directors. (He has since resigned.) But this is also not the first time there's been the perception that Apple has been less than forthcoming on important matters.

Who could forget the uproar over Jobs' physical appearance last summer and his top spokesperson's response that he was "suffering from a common bug"? It came out later that he was having serious medical problems that resulted in a liver transplant earlier this year.

In March, when rumors swirled that some sales employees got laid off, Apple representatives denied the reports. The people who lost their jobs later came forward to confirm the reports.

And just last week, observers of the company wondered if Jobs purposely misled The New York Times when he told them they did not put a camera in the iPod Touch because it didn't make sense for customers--speculation that heightened after a tear-down revealed space for a camera sensor in the updated design.

Apple has a lot of sway in several industries and makes products that people like. But customer confidence in your ability to be forthcoming is important, especially when it comes to making a successful sales pitch for, say, an iPod Touch sans camera, when there could be a new model with a camera coming soon that's just been delayed because of manufacturing problems.

But there's also the reality that a lot of customers just flat out don't care. Apple has a particularly loyal fan base, and to date the company's bottom line hasn't shown distaste for deception or misleading information.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Vonage announced Tuesday that its mobile voice over Internet Protocol app has been approved for use by Apple on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The Internet telephone service provider said it's conducting a beta test of the app and that general availability will be announced at a later date.

Last week Apple confirmed that Vonage's request for app approval was being held up by technical issues with the Vonage software. An Apple spokesperson told CNET News at the time that Apple was working with the developer to resolve the issue but would not elaborate on the nature of the issue.

That delay came to light on the heels of federal regulators opening a probe on Apple's decision to keep the Google Voice application from the App Store. AT&T--Apple's iPhone partner--has denied playing a role in that decision.

Google Voice, which allows users to receive calls placed to a single telephone number in multiple places and make cheap international calls, was deemed unfit for App Store inclusion in July, after it was released for BlackBerry and Android smartphones.

Apple, however, has said the Google Voice app was never actually rejected.

The iStat app's killer feature has been killed.

(Credit: Bjango)

The version 1.1 release of developer Bjango's iStat application for the iPhone last week was marked with disappointment.

To maintain the application's availability on the App Store, Bjango had been told by Apple that it had to remove what was arguably the most compelling feature of version 1.0: Free Memory, which enabled people to clear wired and inactive memory to increase the iPhone's battery life. It also improved the device's performance.

Bjango, which focuses on developing apps for the iPhone, felt that it had no other choice but to create a new version sans the Free Memory feature. iStat 1.1, $1.99, offers only iPhone monitoring. Among other things, users can see battery life calculations and how much memory and disk space remains.

"Apple would not say why we needed to remove the 'Free Memory' feature," Tori Gale, support manager at Bjango, wrote in an e-mail. "(Apple) simply demanded that it was removed, or (it) would delete (version 1.0 of) the app from the store...Nothing iStat did violated the terms of the developer contract, as far as we know, and Apple didn't say that it did."

When pressed for more insight over Apple's ultimatum, Gale had, much to her chagrin, little to say. "Apple really hasn't given us any information," she said. "We simply don't have much we can say."

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Apple App Store approval of a Vonage mobile voice over IP app is being held up by technical issues with the Vonage software, Apple said Wednesday, confirming a report by Tech Trader Daily.

Vonage submitted an application for review and Apple is working with the developer to resolve the issues with the app, Apple spokesperson Natalie Kerris confirmed with CNET News. Kerris did not elaborate on what those issues were.

The revelation comes as federal regulators probe Apple's decision to keep the Google Voice application from the App Store. AT&T--Apple's iPhone partner--has denied playing a role in that decision.

"Let me state unequivocally: AT&T had no role in any decision by Apple to not accept the Google Voice application for inclusion in the Apple App Store," Jim Cicconi, AT&T's senior executive vice president for external and legislative affairs, told the FCC on Friday.

Google Voice, which allows users to receive calls placed to a single telephone number in multiple places and make cheap international calls, was deemed unfit for App Store inclusion in July, after it was released for BlackBerry and Android smartphones.

Apple, however, has said the Google Voice app was never actually rejected. "Contrary to published reports, Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application and continues to study it. The application has not been approved because, as submitted for review, it appears to alter the iPhone's distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone's core mobile-telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls, text messaging, and voice mail," Apple said in a statement.

Even though Google Voice isn't a voice over Internet Protocol application that actually makes calls over the Net, AT&T also did say its agreement with Apple means Apple may not actively lend developers a hand building VoIP applications. "Both parties (AT&T and Apple) required assurances that the revenues from the AT&T voice plans available to iPhone customers would not be reduced by enabling VoIP calling functionality on the iPhone," Cicconi said.

CNET Blog Network member Jim Dalrymple contributed to this story.