Apple's App Store Director Sells His Own Fart Apps
Apple has long been an icon for quality products, but its overflowing iOS App Store is a crapshoot: Nuggets of quality are buried in a vast, steaming heap of inanity. In fact, the man who oversees the App Store process runs a side business selling fart and urination apps.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's App Store has been fighting a quality-perception battle since its earliest days: by December 2008 a single novelty fart app was pulling nearly $10,000 a day, and by May 2010 Silicon Alley Insider was calling out an outright App Store spam problem. The revelation that the man who runs the App Store approval process personally sells fart and urination apps lands in the middle of that arc — and in the same week federal court papers detailed an Apple manager's alleged supplier-kickback scheme, compounding questions about internal oversight.
Gawker's pickup widened the story beyond apps, framing the executive behind Apple's 'Freedom From Porn' stance against his own Twitter activity — so the piece traveled as both an App Store governance story and a hypocrisy narrative.
First-order effects
- The App Store director's side business undercuts the gatekeeping authority he exercises over other developers' submissions — every borderline rejection now carries an obvious conflict-of-interest question.
Second-order effects
- Developers competing against tolerated junk categories face inconsistent standards, sharpening the spam complaints already on record and pressuring Apple to show its review process isn't arbitrary or self-dealing.
Third-order effects
- If curation credibility keeps eroding at the gatekeeper level, Apple's tight-review positioning — sold as the App Store's core advantage over rival platforms — becomes the thing competitors attack rather than copy.
The trend: Mobile app platforms are discovering that curated-distribution models live or die on the perceived integrity of the curators themselves.