John Gruber originally posted on Tuesday, an article outlining the ridiculousness of Apple rejecting Nijawords, on the basis of  it containing “swear” words. Why was it so ridiculous? Many other dictionary apps in the App Store also contain these words.

Today, Gruber has posted a follow up piece stating that Apple’s VP of product marketing Phil Schiller had emailed him to correct Gruber were he was mistaken.

Phil Schiller:

“Let me start with the most important points – Apple did not censor the content in this developer’s application and Apple did not reject this developer’s application for including references to common swear words. You accused Apple of both in your story and the fact is that we did neither.”

And

“The Ninjawords developer then decided to filter some offensive terms in the Ninjawords application and resubmit it for approval for distribution in the App Store before parental controls were implemented. Apple did not ask the developer to censor any content in Ninjawords, the developer decided to do that themselves in order to get to market faster. Even though the developer chose to censor some terms, there still remained enough vulgar terms that it required a parental control rating of 17+.”

Gruber goes on to explain that this was bad timing. The developers wanted to get their app on the store as soon a possible. They submitted in May. The ratings system did not come into effect until mid-June. So Matchbox Software (Nijawords’ developers) had to make a decision. Wait for the rating system to kick in and take a 17+ rating, or  get on the store now with the swear words filtered out.

So, it turns out that Apple wanted Matchbox software to do one or the other, and not both as was previously suggested.

The rest of this article goes on to show that the App Store rules are inconsistently enforced, but most importantly Apple appears to be concerned.

Phil Schiller:

“Apple’s goals remain aligned with customers and developers — to create an innovative applications platform on the iPhone and iPod touch and to assist many developers in making as much great software as possible for the iPhone App Store. While we may not always be perfect in our execution of that goal, our efforts are always made with the best intentions, and if we err we intend to learn and quickly improve.”

I, much like Gruber, feel good about this. An elite from the Apple food chain came down, and spoke in detail about Apple’s handling and analysis of the App Store. It shows a genuine interest in the App Store problems by Apple brass, and that’s a good thing.