> During our review of your application, we found that your application contains inappropriate or irrelevant platform information in the Application Description and/or Release Notes sections
This seems to me more like a "Thou shalt not mention a competing platform" rule than a "We're covering our asses from lawsuits" rule. I mean the guy was only mentioning that he had been a finalist in Google's "Android Developer Challenge." Are you going to tell me that Google can sue someone for trademark infringement over that?
I could see if he was pimping another platform like, "Hey! This app is available for Android too!" Maybe in that case Apple wouldn't want him advertising another platform, but even that doesn't make sense. They only people that are viewing his App's description are people that have an iPhone, right? So why would they care about Android compatibility? It's not likely someone would drop their iPhone and rush out to buy an Android phone over a single App.
It seems the entire linked story was misleading. The dev mentioned the app was a finalist in a Google Android competition. Apple didn't reject it but suggested (whatever that means) the description be changed to remove mention of being in the competition and I agree http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1106361. The iPhone app port wasn't the competitor in that competition.
But presumably it was a 1:1 port, not a 'lite' version. In which case, the only major difference there might be would be would in the performance department, though I'm unsure if the competition weighed that heavily.
> During our review of your application, we found that your application contains inappropriate or irrelevant platform information in the Application Description and/or Release Notes sections
This seems to me more like a "Thou shalt not mention a competing platform" rule than a "We're covering our asses from lawsuits" rule. I mean the guy was only mentioning that he had been a finalist in Google's "Android Developer Challenge." Are you going to tell me that Google can sue someone for trademark infringement over that?
I could see if he was pimping another platform like, "Hey! This app is available for Android too!" Maybe in that case Apple wouldn't want him advertising another platform, but even that doesn't make sense. They only people that are viewing his App's description are people that have an iPhone, right? So why would they care about Android compatibility? It's not likely someone would drop their iPhone and rush out to buy an Android phone over a single App.