During the process to have the 1.0.1 version of SF Bay News approved by apple, it was rejected because it wasn’t appropriately rated. At first we were shocked, as SF Bay News is just a news application. But looking closer into the feedback from Apple, we understood their rational.
SF Bay News can show the web pages for news articles. Some of the news providers provide a search box on these pages. In addition to being able to search their articles, some providers also allow searching across the Internet. This could enable a user to get to some inappropriate content.
On the iPhone a parent can configure things that a child can not access applications above a certain rating. In addition, a parent can disable the built-in web browser. So, theoretically, someone could use an application like SF Bay news to access content that wasn’t intended for them.
We changed the rating to 17+ for SF Bay News, because we want to support parents making the decision about what content their children would be able to access. We made the change, instead of preventing searching from these web sites, because we didn’t want to restrict or limit functionality from the providers.
