Two concurrent stories that should surprise nobody who’s ever really thought about what it means to have a service going through all submissions to decide what’s acceptable for publication — no matter what the criteria are.

engadget.com

[BdEmailer] is the "the first wide email iPhone app that supports client SMTP." That means, in essence, that it duplicates an exact function of Apple’s Mail application on the iPhone and touch. That’s kind of a huge deal, because up until this point we’ve been led to believe that this duplication of functionality is one of the company’s red flags when it comes to approval. […]

Apple… what the hell is going on? You refused MailWrangler and Podcaster for similar reasons, yet BdEmailer passes through your review process, SMTP functionality intact?

arstechnica.com

I have this friend who submitted an application to Apple for review. After a few weeks, it came back with one of those embarrassingly stupid rejection letters that said more about the person reviewing the application than it did about the application itself. In a nutshell, the application violated one of those user interaction rules that seem to exist in certain pompous minds rather than in the actual Apple Human Interface Guidelines. […]

After a day or so of calming down, this person decided to go ahead and resubmit the application. And did so without making a single change to the application. […] If you think for just a second, you’ll figure out the punch line, and you’ll be right: that application was accepted into the store, exactly as is, without any changes whatsoever.