Apple spikes drone-tracking app

Danger Room reports that an app that reports drone strikes to your phone has been rejected from Apple's store for various reasons that seem to boil down to this one: Apple doesn't like it. The student-designed app simply presents existing media accounts of strikes in our open-secret war. It plots them on a map and can push those updates to you. That's it. And yet Apple ultimately found it "objectionable and crude," after issuing a series of rejections with other rationales. 

Apple controls a large chunk of the smartphone market and as part of their end-to-end service, they filter every app that developers would like to present on the iPhone. The company's gatekeeping for the app store helps tamp down the number of crappy apps, but it has long been a theoretical restriction on the free flow of information. 

The company says it's just trying to keep "objectionable" apps off the iPhone, but what does that word mean to Apple's corporate mind? 

Journalists, specifically, seemed at risk of running afoul of the Apple authorities.

Read the entire story at The Atlantic.