Apple to Pull "Widgety" Apps

Apple can't even be nice to Apple fans anymore:

In late April, an unnamed Australian — one of a small team of cross-platform developers known as Shifty Jelly — made a point of telling the world that the Apple App Store is a mighty wonderful place. "I love the app store and the amazing hassle-free distribution it provides and I only really have a few niggling concerns with how Apple has dealt with us, as developers," he wrote in a blog post entitled "Sorry Media, But Apple Isn’t Evil."

But little more than a month later, this outspoken Aussie has accused himself of talking nonsense after the Jobsian cult said it was booting his company's photo-centric iPad application, My Frame, from the App Store. "A month ago I wrote a blog post about how Apple were not actually evil, because I was getting sick of all the media hype and bashing that was going on," he now says. "Little did I know that a month later that blog post would come back and smack me in the face."

-- Steve Jobs beheads iPad apps for acting like desktops

This really is the evil part of the App Store. This app violates no terms of service, appears to be pretty well done, and was getting popular. So why would Apple ban it? The common wisdom, and about the only thing that makes any sense, is that Apple wants to reserve the idea of a widget based desktop to ... Apple. So this is not an app that can do any harm to you, or your phone, or anything - but it may do harm to Apple at some point in the future.

So gone it goes. This isn't just developer unfriendly, this is outright hostile. You might have a good idea, and a good execution - but if it gets too close to competing with Apple, you've just wasted all of your developer money.

Apparently the developer emailed Steve Jobs to see WTF. Jobs responded with:

We are not allowing apps that create their own desktops. Sorry.

Sent from my iPad

Anyone else find the "Sent from my iPad" particularly annoying in that setting?