iPhone Baby Shaker, “Deeply Offensive”

April 25, 2009 by Baby Chums
Filed under: News

Only a few hours before the Apple iPhone application store, (App Store) had it’s 1 billionth download a statement was issued apologizing for allowing the Baby Shaker application onto the store.

Baby Shaker was “deeply offensive and should not have been approved for distribution,” the Apple statement said. Alex Talbot, who appears to be the developer behind Baby Shaker, has still not responded to e-mailed requests for comment on the application

Baby Shaker appeared on the App Store Monday, and was pulled Wednesday after a media frenzy grew following the discovery of the application by the founder of a shaken baby syndrome foundation.

The entire Apple statement follows:

“This application was deeply offensive and should not have been approved for distribution on the App Store. When we learned of this mistake, the app was removed immediately. We sincerely apologize for this mistake and thank our customers for bringing this to our attention.”

The company refused to comment on the process that led to the approval of Baby Shaker as an iPhone application.

If the volume of submissions to the iPhone App Store continues to grow — there are now more than 35,000 applications currently on the store, Apple executives said Wednesday — Apple will be forced to employ an army of application inspectors who will not only have to scour each app for technical quality, but make content-related decisions based on criteria Apple has yet to disclose.

Sikalosoft, the company that created Baby Shaker, has not responded to e-mails requesting comment on the application as well as the approval process, and whether or not Apple raised any objections to the application during that process.

Macworld noticed that Sikalosoft has posted an early candidate for Understatement of the Year on its new Web site. “Okay, so maybe the Baby Shaker iPhone app was a bad idea.”

The rest of the site is devoted to information about Shaken Baby Syndrome.