I think it'a more "Don't claim you're weeding the garden. We know you're not."

They have been. Remember they expurgated all of the "sexy" apps a couple of months ago?

Is iFart still there? If so, I call bullshit.

They killed "shake the baby", they didn't kill iFart. You try figuring out where to draw the line. But there is no doubt that they are culling apps for their content; "weeding" so to speak.

With 3.3.1 Apple is trying to control the overal UX. They can't reject bad music from the iTunes Store, but they can enforce basic encoding standards, so the music doesn't sound like crap for reasons other than the artistic content.

When they removed the "sexy" apps they were using a rule that could be made specific and enforced consistently. The picked adult content because of the peculiar standards that humans (and especially Americans) have when it comes to sex.

Or maybe it's really difficult to phrase a definition for "college humor".

Don't forget that a hypothetical rejection of iFart would have to be backed by legalese from the TOS. What phrasing would you suggest they add? (Alternatively, quote the existing clause you would have them invoke.)

I would say that adding terms to the document constitutes evidence of conscious weeding.

Come to think of it, so does every headline I've ever seen about an app store rejection.

I think it's a reasonable argument, but it's perhaps not stated as well as it could be. It's a response to the (presumed) justification from Apple that they want to do this because cross-compiled applications are often low-quality. So the argument is that if Apple wanted to weed low-quality applications out of the app store, then they should do that based on the quality of the applications, rather than based on the implementation techniques.

Clearly, though, the fact that the app store is already flooded with low-quality applications is indicative of the fact that Apple hasn't been doing that, which makes that justification seem totally bogus: if they really cared about low-quality applications, they could have done something about it long ago without restricting cross-compilation techniques. And if they wanted to put a stop to it now, they could still do it without restricting cross-compilation.

So to extend your analogy: if you want to weed the garden, then pull the weeds already. No need to have this strange level of indirection that will result in removing only a small number of the weeds while also eliminating plenty of flowers.

It would be more like taking out flowers in an attempt to free your garden of weeds. :)

Actually, rather more like saying "We won't accept another shipment of flowers mixed up with weeds until we sort the weeds from the flowers we already have."

That's not what they said. They said we are not taking flowers/weeds combinations that arrive on purple trucks. But if you want to dump a whole mess of stuff in a red truck, that is fine with us.

Meanwhile, they don't allow the gardeners to weed the garden because the gardeners are not dressed in their sunday best.