Category: Cell Phone Talk
I just laughed my head off when I read this headline in the business section of my local paper and had to post it here for all you folks who love to use Apps on your IPhones.
Enough with the farting, Apple says No new crude apps approved for iPhones Friday, October 1, 2010 02:51 AM By Tim Feran and Kevin Joy THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
In outlining what's acceptable for its App Store, Apple Inc. has cleared the air regarding one notable category: fart applications.
New ones are no longer welcome.
We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store," the company said in recently issued guidelines for the app-review process. We don't need any more fart apps.
The store offers hundreds of fart apps, which provide rip-roaring sound effects to users of the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.
They exploded into prominence in late 2008 after iFart Mobile, which costs 99 cents, became the No. 1-downloaded app in the entertainment category. It once yielded $10,000 in sales in a day.
Many variations allow users to control the length, tone and other auditory particulars of digital flatulence.
The App Store guidelines were part of an announcement in September in which Apple said it was relaxing restrictions on the development tools used to create apps.
The guidelines don't ban existing fart apps, just new ones.
Justin Searls, a Columbus software developer for a company that creates iPhone apps for businesses, thinks Apple might be backing away from novelty apps.
I think some of it has already run its course," said Searls, 25, who has watched the "less absolutely absurd" tools rise in popularity above the crude fare. When people start using smart phones for several years, a farting app isn't going to grab their attention.
Joel Comm, developer of iFart Mobile, thinks Apple should, indeed, curb the number of novelty apps in its store inventory.
Given the fact that the majority don't sell at all, and combined with the fact that other apps have copied our name and our intellectual property, perhaps it would make sense for Apple to kick redundant apps out," Comm wrote recently on his blog.
Jon Myers, an app developer who recently moved from Columbus to New York, said popular ideas will always draw copycats.
I wouldn't develop that crap, but if people want to go for it, great," said Myers, creator of Cornhole All-Stars, a game modeled after the popular tailgating diversion. It's kind of a gold rush. A lot of kids have iPhones.
Clearly, novelty apps have their fans.
People love the whoopee cushion - it's kind of like the same idea," said Taylor Jordan, an Ohio State University sophomore from Dublin who last year added the free BaconFarts app to his iPod Touch.
He's far more partial to the gadget's chess and solitaire functions, but the 20-year-old said the bodily sounds can be good for an occasional laugh.
You just tap a button, and it makes a noise. That's as simple as it is.
What is the world coming to if people have nothing better to do than to create ridiculous programs like this? Why so many of the same thing anyway?
lol wow. I don't have any farting apps on my iPhone and don't plan to put any on it. Sure, it can be entertaining, but those apps are redundant, as the article stated above.
Still 1 would be pretty funny though.
God, how tasteless.
Lol. Wow. I would probably download it just for kicks and giggles, but, why so many repeats? Strange... Guess some people have no life.
I don't have one, but in that case I rather get a woompy cushion. I've seen plenty of people with those at college dorms. and i would play with it.
The farting apps aren't so much repeats, they are variations on the same theme:
farting pianos, farting drum machines, etc.
As some of these companies either charge a little for the apps, or give away the free ones earning only ad support and selling other apps, I could hardly say they have no life, though I realize that term is just a 20-something of the frequent "what ever" the daughter and friends did when they were, as is now called, pre-teens.
Tasteless?
More to the point, it is a free market. The Soviet Union failed for a reason.
To that end, there are endless nature apps, even a rocket sounds app full of roars, several sound effects apps with all sorts of sounds including post-inebriative puking and the like.
Sometimes, to some, what is on the free market may seem tasteless. But either it is or isn't a market, and if Apple stops developers from doing it, they will just do it someplace else if it gets them notoriety or money or both.
So buy what you want and don't the rest. Smile. People create them because they might make a dollar. No harm in that. Same reason we have choices of cell phones and company's.