You Lie

You Lie is the App that Apple didn’t want anyone to see, but is now available on the App Store for FREE — down load it by clicking here! What was Apple’s problem? Let’s start at the beginning. On September 9, 2009 Representative Joe Wilson (Republican-South Carolina) shocked many observers and caused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat- California) to shoot off a death glare in his direction, when he shouted; “You lie!” after President Barack Obama denied that health care legislation would provide free coverage for illegal immigrants during his speech to a joint session of congress. 

A week after submission, we received an ominous email from Apple stating that our app was going to take a bit longer than normal to review due to the nature of the app. We were at a loss because this was our most simple and straightforward app. It consists of one button as you can see from the screenshot to the right.

When the user presses the button a recording is played. If you haven’t guessed already, the idea of the app is to poke fun at Rep Joe Wilson’s outburst. It was never our intention to make any political judgments or take sides. The idea of the app is to have fun. It’s called satire. This Your Lie outburst has been joked about and debated to death zillions of times in every newspapers and talk show on the planet. In fact, hundreds if not thousands of Apple podcasts and iPhone news, video, twitter and blog Apps have undoubtedly featured the You Lie story.

What was Apple’s problem? They were nice enough to tell us when we received a personal phone call from Richard who works in the iPhone App Review Team. It turns out that they didn’t like the fact that 4 of 70 recordings included the phrase You Lie, Mr. President versus the simpler versions we use in the majority of the recordings such as You Lie, You’re a Liar, Liar and You’re Such a Liar. Richard claimed that using ‘Mr President’ is objectionable because it ridicules public figures. On a second call he had an issue with our App Description (see Banned App Description below) and we were forced to remove any mention of the event and of the names Obama and Joe Wilson. For some reason, Apple believes that it is their right to wipe the memory of the event clean and not allow any mention of it that is not a simple news story. We have to believe that there have been plenty of one-sided diatribes both for and against Wilson’s outburst within the walls of the App Store and Podcast areas, but of course Apple just had issue with You Lie. Not sure what to make of any of this, but we had no choice but to comply with Apple’s request if we wanted to give You Lie any chance of seeing the light of day.