Google broke Apple rules with iPhone voice search

Posted by Al Warmington on Thu 27 Nov 2008

Sneaky marketing tactics make Apple look the other way?

There was a brief kafuffle at the start of last week when it emerged that a hotly anticipated voice search application, made by the folk at Google, hadn’t shown up on the iPhone App Store when it was expected.

Following an intriguing demonstration vid, it was believed that the updated Google Mobile App was due to land on the following Friday – 14^th November. The big day came and went and over the following weekend nothing more was heard about it. On the Monday morning, internet speculation was rife, with bloggers and journos speculating as to why the sudden delay had taken the wind out of Google’s high profile launch.

Later that day – 18^th November – speculation was ended by the arrival of the App in the Store. Problem sorted, end of story, right?

Well, no actually. Another interesting bit of news has emerged that puts a fresh twist on the situation. Google has admitted that the voice search function actually violates Apple’s very strict terms of agreement.

Voice search uses the iPhone’s proximity sensor (normally used to dim the display and shut of the touchscreen interface when the handset is next to your face) to trigger the recording of your vocal search request. The twist is that there’s no means of accessing the proximity sensor using the standard iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK), so Google must have created its own means of using it, which is something forbidden by Apple’s SDK rules.

Its reason for breaking the rules is that it wanted to get an "innovative and useful application" out to users.

Fair enough then, but Apple must have realised this. It would certainly explain the delay, but it doesn’t explain why the software then made it through to the App Store regardless.

While we’re definitely not opposed to the idea of software makers bending the rules to get better applications out to iPhone users, there’s a strong whiff of double standards here. On the one hand, Apple will refuse to approve some Apps for the most pernickety of reasons, most notably anything that apes existing Apple software, even if it performs better *cough* Opera *cough*. But on the other, it seems that if the software is made by someone big enough, and who can promote their App loudly enough, Apple will turn a blind eye to a bit of rule breaking.

That hardly seems fair on the smaller developers out there.

Apple (via BetaNews)