With all the games coming to the iPhone and no rating system implemented, people wonder how they will be able to tell if it’s suitable for children. As of now, there is no rating system on games in the iTunes App Store. Last week Apple announced that with the new iPhone Software will include a way to put parental settings on games in the App Store but never said how they would determine how the games will be rated.
Well now it appears that the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board) is thinking about getting in on the action. They are most known for rating all video games on consoles and computer sold in the US. Last week Apple announced that the new iPhone 3.0 Software and said that it will have parental controls for games but never said how it happen. Is Apple going to ask the ESRP to rate all iPhone games?
As the article points out, there are just too many apps in the iTunes Store for this to be a speedy process. Also ESRB isn’t free which means that someone will have to pay them and knowing Apple, they will make the developers pay because Apple doesn’t make much money off hosting the apps.
I think there are two ways Apple can avoid this. First is that they say every app that is submitted it reviewed so that it is safe to put on the app store and it doesn’t break any rules that Apple says all apps must follow. This means they hired people to review these apps even though it’s seems extremely arbitrary which gets in and not. Some apps get in and then get removed because someone found out something they can do with it that is NSFW like the e-book reader that was taken down because someone found the Kama Sutra on it while others like Podcatcher was rejected all together because it violated something the Apple didn’t want other people to do but wasn’t made clear at the time. As many people have speculated, it’s like there are four people running the approval process, three of which are lenient and the other is just being straight to the book and not letting anything through.
The other thing I think they can do which is better is have the developer of the app post what they believe is appropriate and if anything suspicious is found, ask the developer to change it or have the app approvers change it. You could also have people on the app store file a complaint about the rating of the app like what they have for podcast (on the side of the podcast page there is a link to report a concern). The ladder option makes more sense because it saves the time to get approved faster and it makes them more conscience of what they are putting in their app.
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