From Daring Fireball: Apple Wrongly Rejects iPhone App for Use of Private APIs

After waiting 33 days to hear from Apple after submitting their app Peeps to the App Store, Plausible Labs found out the app had been rejected.
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The problem? According to developer Landon Fuller, they didn’t use any private APIs — they created their own Cover Flow implementation using the public APIs.

So, Google can publicly admit that their iPhone app uses private APIs and that’s OK, but a small indie developer gets rejected for cleanly creating a feature that looks like Cover Flow.

This actually bothers me enough to tempt me to create my own CoverFlow-like implementation and post it as BSD-licensed software. I mean, I can understand if Apple doesn’t want an application to look like CoverFlow and thus set forth the rules–but to reject an application because it cleanly implements something that looks like CoverFlow? Feh.