Baby Shaker

~ the last words ~

In april 2009 the iphone was still a carrier contract object in turkey, priced like a small appliance and owned by roughly nobody I knew. Baby Shaker reached me the way it reached most of the world outside the App Store, as a news item about Apple's review process. It was never really a game people played. It was a game people read about.

The app came from an outfit called Sikalosoft, which The Guardian later reported was one programmer named Alex Talbot. It cost ninety nine cents. You got a black and white illustration of an infant over a soundtrack of crying, with a timer counting up from zero while you rocked the handset back and forth as if cradling it.

Shaking instead of rocking ended the round. Two red crosses appeared over the baby's eyes and the crying stopped. The app then asked whether you would like to play again. The store description carried the line "Never, never shake a baby", which was written as a warning and read by everybody as a punchline.

Apple approved it. The approval team was run by Phillip Shoemaker, the person in charge of App Store review for years afterward, who has since said publicly that this one was his mistake. The store was nine months old that month and had not yet worked out what it was going to refuse.

~ the record ~

~ the postmortem ~

The complaints did not come from the usual internet outrage machinery. Patrick Donohue, who runs the Sarah Jane Brain Foundation and named it for his daughter, wrote directly to Steve Jobs, saying words could not describe his reaction. Shoemaker has described protesters turning up outside the Infinite Loop campus. Apple removed the app on 22 april and put out a statement through spokeswoman Natalie Kerris the following day calling it deeply offensive and saying it should never have been approved for sale.

The timing is the part nobody planned. The App Store crossed one billion downloads on 23 april 2009, the same day as the apology, with Apple's press release going out the morning after. The billionth app was Bump, downloaded by a thirteen year old in Connecticut who won a MacBook Pro for it. Nine months in, the store was simultaneously the fastest software distribution success anybody had ever built and a thing that had just sold a game about killing an infant for two days.

Sikalosoft said nothing then and has said nothing since. There was no defense and no sanitized resubmission, which is unusual for a developer with a story to tell.

~ the inheritance ~

What survived Baby Shaker is the review process it embarrassed. Apple's guidelines grew an entire vocabulary about objectionable content over the following years, and the clauses about material designed to upset or disgust date from this stretch of 2009 rather than from any single later scandal. The store went from a place where a joke about killing a baby could be approved by accident to a place where developers write blog posts about being rejected over a placeholder screenshot.

The other inheritance is smaller. Baby Shaker is a lost app. The binary came down before anybody thought to keep a copy, so what remains is a recording somebody uploaded to YouTube on 23 april 2009 and the news coverage. For a piece of software that was on sale for two days, that is a surprisingly complete record, and it is more than most of the apps sitting next to it in the store that year ever got.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »