Both John Gruber and Jim Dalrymple have opined on this already and with greater intelligence and thoughtfulness than I could ever hope to. (In other words, hit those links to see what smart people have to say about this.) But I do want to latch on to something that both Gruber and Dalrymple made it a point to highlight: This very specific language in the Apple response.
Contrary to published reports, Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it.
Says Gruber:
That’s interesting, but it’s a bit of semantic hair-splitting. It’s good to know that the decision is not final and that Apple may reconsider, but the fact remains that Apple chose not to publish the app. (It’s also worth noting that Google’s initial statement regarding this did not use the word rejected either. Their spokesperson told TechCrunch: “Apple did not approve the Google Voice application we submitted six weeks ago to the Apple App Store.â€)
Says Dalrymple:
Notice that Google is using the same language that Apple used. The app was not approved — Google never said the app was rejected. This all seems like word games, but it could be important.
I think, instead of “hairsplitting” or “word games” what may be at play here is a subtle difference in language that was lost on some of those developers whose applications were not initially approved by Apple.
It seems more likely that, after weeks or months of difficult labor creating an application, those developers whose applications were not approved, meaning that they were required to make some changes to their work before Apple would accept the application for sale at the app store, felt that their effort up to that point had been rejected and therefore used the word “rejected” to characterize the way they felt.
This makes it possible, to my mind anyway, that much of the recent loud screaming about app store rejections had very little to do with Apple rejecting anything, and more to do with some developers feeling rejected when their applications weren’t approved.