Apple’s App Store Director Sells Fart Apps On the Side [Apple]

Phillip Shoemaker is Apple’s director of applications technology. He’s the guy in command of Apple’s capricious, often-contested App Store approval process. He also has a facet business selling fart and urination apps in that very same App Store.

Shoemaker’s other source of income was delivered to light by Wired’s Brian X. Chen, who found that Shoemaker sells apps under the name Gray Noodle. Among his creations: iWiz, a pee simulator by which iPhone users can ” simulate urination: faster, slower, or just a trickle,” and Animal Farts, through which you could trigger sound effects for ” fart,” ” poot,” ” drop,” and ” wiz.”

An Apple spokesperson said that Shoemaker’s apps were written and approved for the App Store before he was an Apple employee, though Chen points out that three of Gray Noodle’s seven apps, including iWiz, went live inside the App Store after Shoemaker tweeted about working at Apple on March 9, 2009. Typically, Apple employees are forbidden from publishing apps within the App Store without special permission.

The spokesperson also said that Shoemaker’s ” perspective as a developer is without doubt one of the valuable things he brings to Apple’s developer relations team.”

While Apple has no rules banning fart apps from the App Store, it has cast a wide net banning titillating apps-their definition of titillating is person who is hazy and ever-changing-and Steve Jobs himself has announced his vision of Apple offering customers ” freedom from porn.” It’s hard to imagine he’ll be thrilled about these scatalogical diversions developed by top-ranking employees of his own company coming to light. [Wired]

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This post is tagged: app, Apples, apps, director, Fart, Sells