I think there's something rather juvenile about pointing out that every well-meaning rule or law based system has its hazy areas, gray zones, and ambiguities. The developer here is ostensibly exercising deliberate provocation.
I'd much rather wait until a well-meaning, well-intended app, one that is attempting to be useful to a regular person, is rejected for unreasonable reasons and get outraged about that. This meanwhile is clearly a bid for attention.
Somebody who is deliberately provoking Apple for reasons "uphill" from more insidious reasons is wasting our time. In my opinion most slippery slope arguments are just bad arguments used to make something look much worse than it is.
Provocation is forcing someone to do something they didn't want to. Nothing of the sort happened here. Apple are the ones who decided to sell cars with the hood welded shut. They weren't provoked into rejecting this app, they decided that long ago.
How do you know this was his clear intention? Everyone is going to have a different opinion on what a "well-meaning, well-intended app" is and restricting certain apps based on what one considers "well-meaning" is a very myopic and inconsiderate view to have.
This argument doesn't fly because you are making "well-meaning" out to be more ambiguous and subject to disagreement than it actually is. All of us exercise judgment every day about well-meaningness when we excuse people for bumping into us, saying something they didn't intend, misunderstanding an unfamiliar rule or custom. It's what we do without thinking twice.
You though, like many, many, others, are getting caught up in the subjective nature of exercising judgment and would like to see a list of necessary and sufficient conditions that is followed logically and to a t, something like a mathematics that has right and wrong and no in between. Unfortunately these things don't exist. If you look at how government and academia played out we have a judiciary systems and admissions systems that, yeah, have a few well-meaning people exercising judgment about slew of important topics that affect lots of people. It's either that or anarchy.
There is subjectivity about a lot if concepts, laws, and institutions we don't have a choice but to share. The presence of subjectivity is not grounds for eliminating that institution.
I am not saying Apple should eliminate its curating process altogether, but rather that it shouldn't dictate the existence of an application solely based on competitive conflicts it has with the information within it. It is clearly an action of insecurity and selfishness on Apple's part. I could also argue that constraining and dictating information based on one's views can also lead to anarchy.
I'd much rather wait until a well-meaning, well-intended app, one that is attempting to be useful to a regular person, is rejected for unreasonable reasons and get outraged about that. This meanwhile is clearly a bid for attention.
Somebody who is deliberately provoking Apple for reasons "uphill" from more insidious reasons is wasting our time. In my opinion most slippery slope arguments are just bad arguments used to make something look much worse than it is.