In case you haven’t heard, there was an application put up at the App Store — briefly, before Apple pulled it — called “I Am Rich”. It did, well, nothing really, just display a picture … for $999.99.
Yeah, funny joke, ha-ha. But would you believe, eight people actually bought it??
But Apple couldn’t pull it down before curious aristocrats — eight of them — had purchased it. Six people from the United States, one from Germany and one from France dropped a grand for the gem in the first 24 hours it was available, Heinrich said. That’s $5,600 in revenue for Heinrich and $2,400 for Apple, which collects 30% of each sale for “store upkeep.”
And, allegedly, six of those eight are satisfied.
“I’ve got e-mails from customers telling me that they really love the app,” adding that they had “no trouble spending the money,” he said.
Well, we find it rather hard to dredge up any flattering words for the programming achievement — but as a piece of performance art, this little brouhaha certainly is a milestone, indeed. Massive amounts of generated angst flooded across the spectrum from totalitarian demands for Apple to censor “junk” apps all the way over to libertarian defenses of the caveat emptor principle by way of musings on the buying process and calls for Apple to be more transparent with its app-pulling process, as apparently there’s been no communication to the developer as to on exactly what grounds they justified pulling the app. And, indeed, as the app does not fall under any of the various categories of nefarious functionality — hard to do when you actually have no functionality, certainly — there is no obvious justification in the agreement for denying distribution, as “expensive joke” appears nowhere. Yes, we checked.
In any case, we find it hard to get behind the calls for censorship, not just on libertarian principle but because the outrage seems selectively applied. If it annoys you that somebody can buy a $999.99 app for an iPhone that does nothing much, how come we don’t see you getting at least as upset that somebody can buy a $14,990 case for that same iPhone that does nothing more than a $14.99 model? Logically that should merit another order and a magnitude of a half of outrage, right?
No, we think the allegedly offended people are just putting on a front to cover up what they’re actually thinking, which is probably about the same as us:
$5,600?? $5,600!! WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT FIRST???!???!!!!!
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