Apple Censors 'Ninjawords Dictionary' iPhone Application
Daring Fireball's John Gruber reports on the case of Ninjawords Dictionary [App Store, $1.99], a dictionary application for the iPhone based on Wiktionary offering a high-quality user experience and information content that was recently approved by Apple for inclusion in the App Store. Unfortunately, Apple's approval process for the application required several months and multiple rounds of refinement for the application, ultimately resulting the application carrying a "17+" age rating and also lacking a number of words deemed "objectionable" by Apple's reviewers.
Apple censored an English dictionary.
A dictionary. A reference book. For words contained in all reasonable dictionaries. For words contained in dictionaries that are used every day in elementary school libraries and classrooms.
Gruber's lengthy post details the seemingly ridiculous hoops the application's developers jumped through to win Apple's approval, from adding the mature age rating to preventing "objectionable" words from appearing as suggestions for partial word matches when searching to finally removing the "objectionable" words entirely. A number of the words that Apple objected to and have been removed from the application also carry entirely non-objectionable definitions, and it is unclear why those entire entries were required to be removed instead of merely the offending definitions for those words.
Every time I think I've seen the most outrageous App Store rejection, I'm soon proven wrong. I can't imagine what it will take to top this one.
Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to purchase a censored dictionary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
