UAV updateApple rejects app which tracks drone strikes against militants

In August, the Guardian posted an interactive map of American drone strikes in Pakistan, showing where missiles from UAVs hit and struck terrorists. The map data was collected from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in Britain and was available through an iPhone application to the Guardian.

Later in the month however, Apple denied an application created by a New York University graduate student that used the same data exclusively in order to track drone strikes.

Josh Begley, who called his app the Drone+, is yet another developer to be rejected because of Apple’s policies that determine what can and cannot be distributed through the App Store for iPhones and iPads.

In a phone interview with the New York Times, Begley said his app has been rejected twice before for violations of Apple’s policies. The first time was because his app was “not entertaining or useful enough.” Begley made some changes to his app, including alerts whenever a new drone strike was reported. Apple later rejected the app yet again due to the placement of a Google logo on the map that was being used for the app.

This time around Apple notified Begley that his app had been rejected for violating provision 16.1 of its guidelines, which bans “excessively objectionable or crude content.” Drone+ does not contain any graphic images showing the aftermath of the attacks, or objectionable language. According to Begley all the application does is present the location on a map.

“I wanted to have a more granular sense of what drone strikes really did look like out of genuine curiosity,” Begley told the Times when describing his motivations for creating the app.

Tom Neumayr, an Apple spokesman, confirmed that the Drone+ was rejected for violating Apple’s policy on objectionable content, but he would not comment further on the subject.

In 2010 Apple rejected an app that featured a satirical political cartoon because of a policy against ridiculing public figures. Apple eventually accepted the app, but the incident brought up concerns about Apple’s gatekeeper role as the amount of media distributed through its store increases.

The rejection of the Drone+ app is still puzzling people though, as the material that Apple deemed questionable is the exact same material that was available to the Guardian’s app. Apple has not said what the exact cause of the rejection was, but people are wondering whether the reason is because the Guardian is a well-known news organization while Begley is just a college student.

Apple has not said whether it will accept the Drone+ app in the future and Begley has not stated whether he will continue to tweak his application in order to get it accepted by the Apple App Store.