★ App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours

Terry Godier, “ Browsers Have Standards, the App Store Has Judgment ”: A while ago I tried to submit an iOS app for Dark Hours , my astronomy website for normal people. It was rejected on the grounds that it was astrology. It has no tarot function, no horoscopes, and nothing that I, or anyone else I’ve asked, would associate with astrology. I penned a nice little rant two years ago expressing my fury over the way that kooks promoting astrology often try to insinuate that their voodoo pseudoscience is even vaguely related to the hard science of astronomy. And it really is an unfortunate fluke of the English language that two subjects with a contentious relationship are differentiated as words by a single letter. Even if you know the difference between the two, and care, if you’re reading quickly your eyes might conflate one word for the other. But if you actually look at Godier’s Dark Hours , for even just a few seconds, it is instantly obvious that it pertains to the science of astronomy and has absolutely nothing — zero, zilch, nada — to do with astrology. So even if Apple’s App Store reviewer misread the submission’s description, and wrongly assumed it was yet another quack astrology app, if they launched it and spent just a few seconds poking around, they should have instantly recognized their incorrect assumption. But that’s not what happened. They rejected the app on the utterly incorrect grounds that it pertained to astrology.