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Learning How Your iPhone Was Made: There Was an App For That

Now there's an iPhone game about the real people who suffer and die to make iPhones, and Apple doesn't like it very much.
Janus Rose
New York, US

Now there's an iPhone game about the real people who suffer and die to make iPhones, and Apple doesn't like it very much.

It didn't take long for Molleindustria's Phone World to get pulled from the App Store — 2 hours and 35 minutes, to be exact. Hailing from same creators responsible for politically-charged games like Wikileaks simulator Leaky World and McDonalds: The Videogame, Phone World follows the construction of a modern smartphone. From the dangerous mining of coltan ore in Congo by laborers as young as 8 years old to the factory conditions that led to the infamous Foxconn suicides last year, the game doesn't seem to pull any punches, acting as a disturbing primer on cell phone production, its associated cost to human life, and the wasteful culture of hyperconsumerism it legitimizes in its wake.

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That is, until Apple killed it.

The takedown notice, which Molleindustria posted on their website, cites a number of rules — some painfully vague — from Apple's developer guidelines:

15.2 Apps that depict violence or abuse of children will be rejected

16.1 Apps that present excessively objectionable or crude content will be rejected

21.1 Apps that include the ability to make donations to recognized charitable organizations must be free

21.2 The collection of donations must be done via a web site in Safari or an SMS

The last two are bogus — Molleindustria did not include the means to donate to non-profits from within the app itself, but rather promised to donate all profits themselves. As for the first two points, the irony and absurdity here is truly astounding. Can Apple really play the moral high ground when theirs are the very morals in question?

How do you make a smartphone game that's critical of the smartphone, a product that companies like Apple deem sacred? Well, first you release it on Android. Easy enough. Now Molleindustria needs to decide if they will release a new version of the game that attempts to conform to Apple's restrictions on violence and crude content, a move which would be a heavy cross to bear seeing as how the power of the game's message rests in the violent nature of exploitation.

There have been plenty of places to draw the line with apps in the past. We're all for banning the ones that allow your phone to scan for DUI checkpoints. But citing "objectionable content" in a situation involving a potential threat to brand identity could be a dangerous precedent for Apple's platform, even if it is technically against their regulations. If iOS dominates and desktop computing yields to touchscreen ubiquity as it's already beginning to, there's not much room left in the equation for free speech. Apple likes to fancy itself a responsible curator of culture, but sometimes it can look more like an angry dad who won't talk about his job at the dinner table.

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