> As much as I spend my time "fighting the good fight" against Apple (and thereby am not in any way their friend or someone who agrees with many of their decisions, especially when it comes to the openness of their device), their marketplace should not be treated as someone's art project: putting products in the ecosystem whose sole goal is not to be purchased or even downloaded for free but to make someone browsing the store feel bad about themselves may be an interesting conceptual goal but it is not something I believe that anyone, much less Apple, should have to tolerate.
Looking at it a different way, it's the perfect free app. Just by seeing it in the list of applications to download, and the person thinking about whether they want to install it or not, it's achieved it's purpose.
If the app simply occasionally popped up a notification telling the user to remember that drone attacks were continuing to happen, or if it simply displayed a single page when launched reminding the user of drone attacks, and the developer DID expect it to be downloaded, would that make a difference? If not, what about something similar that reminded the user to be a good person or presented a biblical proverb?
The developer seems to want to transfer SOMETHING to the user, even if in this case user is moved from "those who have downloaded and launched the app" to "those who are viewing it in the app store".
There may still be other reasons to reject it from your store as well (I can think of a few, such as guerrilla advertising. The concept IS the message), but wasting people's time may not be the best of them.
Looking at it a different way, it's the perfect free app. Just by seeing it in the list of applications to download, and the person thinking about whether they want to install it or not, it's achieved it's purpose.
If the app simply occasionally popped up a notification telling the user to remember that drone attacks were continuing to happen, or if it simply displayed a single page when launched reminding the user of drone attacks, and the developer DID expect it to be downloaded, would that make a difference? If not, what about something similar that reminded the user to be a good person or presented a biblical proverb?
The developer seems to want to transfer SOMETHING to the user, even if in this case user is moved from "those who have downloaded and launched the app" to "those who are viewing it in the app store".
There may still be other reasons to reject it from your store as well (I can think of a few, such as guerrilla advertising. The concept IS the message), but wasting people's time may not be the best of them.