Apple relents on Mad artist's caricature app
Company apparently has a change of heart about the Bobble Rep app, which features caricatures of congressional politicians and provides contact information.
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Apple's App Store has given a nod to an application that features bobble-headed caricatures of congressional politicians and provides contact information.
"Apple came to its senses yesterday and approved the app," Mad Magazine artist Tom Richmond wrote in his blog Saturday. "You have to wonder how much of the decision was based on the press [coverage] and image hit Apple had taken, and how much of it was simply that some overworked approval person rubber stamped it as a reject."
The Bobble Rep-111th Congress Edition app caught the public's attention this week after Richmond wrote a blog about the rejection and quoted from Apple's letter. The letter stated that the app violated the developer license agreement because it "contains content that ridicules public figures," according to Richmond's earlier post.
Apparently, someone at Apple didn't think it was particularly funny to see Richmond's 540 caricatured heads, which bobble around when an iPhone is shaken.
Richmond had called Apple's decision "truly ridiculous" and had written that the "caricatures aren't mean or very exaggerated."
The app costs 99 cents, which comes out to about one-fifth of a cent per politician.
(By the way, the 540 politicians includes the 100 senators, 435 representatives, and five nonvoting delegates.)