Phil Schiller Talks About the iPhone App Approval Process With BusinessWeek

The most interesting thing about Arik Hesseldahl’s interview with Schiller for BusinessWeek isn’t anything that Schiller says, but that the interview exists at all. The debate about the App Store review process is expanding into the mainstream press, and that’s a good thing. Apple cares far more about how customers perceive the App Store than developers (which attitude is probably exactly right).

Some of the details of the interview are interesting, too, including talk about Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil Speakers Touch rejection on trademark grounds:

Schiller didn’t directly address Airfoil Speakers, but he says Apple is trying to make trademark guidelines more sophisticated. “We need to delineate something that might confuse the customer and be an inappropriate use of a trademark from something that’s just referring to a product for the sake of compatibility,” he says.

That sounds exactly right.

★ Monday, 23 November 2009