Who doesn’t like a good fart gag? Well, a lot of people don’t and at least one of those opposed to bathroom humor works at Apple vetting applications at the iPhone store. How can we be sure of this? An application called Pull My Finger didn’t make it through the application store vetting process.
You know the vetting process which let HelpMe! through.

High standards are one thing, if Apple insisted on only really good, useful applications in the App store it would be easy to understand why Pull my Finger was excluded. But the App store hasn’t turned out to be a stamp of quality, it has turned out to be a stamp of… well something. Being sure of just what is difficult to say. Watch Pull my Finger in action:

Sure it isn’t the height of humor but it isn’t bad and people do see Kevin Smith movies after all. And really, what prevents excess flatulence from being high art anyway? Nothing. As Le Petomane would attest (he’s dead know, but he would).

Excuse the tangent. The point is that Apple has only two paths to choose from. The company can either choose to let most anything through or be super vigilant an only allow access to the cream of the crop. The profitable, market share growing thing is to let most everything through. And when the original iPhone came out that was the plan. There was no app store, it would all be handled by the web (hi Google Chrome). When the App store was announced that changed. Steve promised the apps would be limited by:
Porn, privacy, bandwidth hog, illegal, malicious and unforeseen.
Steve’s guidelines aside there’s repercussions either way. If the standards are too high (or unclear) then developers will be afraid to develop. If standards are too low then the app store ends up with a lot crap written by people who buy books with names like “iPhone programming for dummies.” Between the two scenarios most would take choice over selectivity any day.

Oh, a fart joke:
Elderly man goes to the doctor. “Doctor, I’ve been letting off these horrible silent-but-deadly farts for a week now, it’s horrible. There goes one right now. The smell is terrible but it makes no noise. There goes another one. Doc, you gotta help me, what’s wrong with me?”
The doctor says, “Well, first of all, you’re going deaf.”