GIF Finder creator Matt Cheetham today announced that his popular GIF curating app will be pulled from the App Store following a lengthy back-and-forth with Apple. Cheetham faced stonewalling from the company thanks mostly to a few copyright issues of Disney-related characters within the app.
Begun by Cheetham as a side project a few summers ago, the app used Tumblr and Imgur's APIs to discover and curate a collection of GIFs and images and distill them into categories or as search results for users to browse. It launched in 2012 and had nearly 90,000 downloads in the years since.
Image via iDownloadBlog
A recent update caused the app to crash on the iPad version when sharing a GIF, so Cheetham submitted an update to fix the issue. Instead of the usual okay from Apple, on January 25 he received a rejection notice for the update because the app "includes content or features that resemble various well-known, third-party marks, including Disney characters."
Thank you for your response. However, in order to proceed with your application, we require documentation demonstrating your right to use the images included in your app and/or metadata, specifically addressing your right to copyrighted images.
Otherwise, if you believe you can make the necessary changes to your application and/or metadata so that it does not infringe the rights of a third party, we encourage you to resubmit your revised application and/or metadata.
Cheetham pointed out that he doesn't directly own the images and proceeded to offer copyright, disclaimers, and links to the Tumblr and Imgur terms of service, but he admitted it "all has fallen on deaf ears." He ultimately relented, pulling the crash-prone app from the storefront upon Apple's repeated requests for documentary evidence of his ownership of the content.
At this point, I don't have the time or knowledge on how to fight this any further. I can't have an app in the store that I cannot support (and that crashes when attempting to use it's main function!), so today I am removing GIF Finder from sale and calling the project dead.
There's lots of other really great GIF Finding apps out there that are packed edge to edge with content from various API's. I wish them all the best with their next update and only hope they can continue to slip them in under the radar as I appear to have done for the last 3 years.
Apple and Disney's history is well-known, especially Steve Jobs' hand in the now Disney-owned Pixar Animation Studios, but Apple's crackdown on GIF Finder is unusual. GIF Finder has been in the App Store for three years without rousing attention and there are several other similar GIF apps in the App Store.
Apple has recently been enforcing App Store policies that it's been lenient about in the past, rejecting a number of apps that included screenshots of violence or guns, causing developers to modify the shots or remove the imagery all together before being able to update or release their apps at all.