Apple’s Shaky Standards: Baby Shaker iPhone App Approved, Quickly Yanked

According to the App Store arbiters of taste that every app passes through, it’s not okay to “ridicule public figures“, fart, or stream “potentially offensive” TV shows. But it was okay to shake a baby.

Yes, that’s right, Apple approved an app called “Baby Shaker,” before jerking it out of the store hours later. (But not before I could download it, which, according to the founder of the National Centre on Shaken Baby Syndrome, encourages me to shake real babies, which isn’t good, since according to the founder of the Stop Shaken Baby Syndrome because I’m in “the population group that is already statistically the most likely to shake babies.”) It’s painfully simple—there’s a black-and-white sketch of baby that cries annoyingly until you shake the phone enough to make it stop, at which point a pair of red X’s appear over its eyes.

The app is so poorly made it’s definitely not worth 99 cents. Here’s the sole review for it on iTunes, which pretty much sums it up: But, yeah, how does that approval process work again? Oh yeah. [iTunes via Cnet]