The history of German Sex? Is that anything like the Book of Italian War Heroes? :) –Rory O’Connor

german-sex-app-store

After almost a month of waiting, Apple has finally accepted German Sex into the App Store. Even though I’ve lived in Germany for three years, I still can’t always remember the sex of every noun when I speak. In German, every noun can have one of three genders: masculine (der), feminine (die) or neuter (das). The gender of each noun is rather arbitrary. My program has the two thousand most commonly used nouns and will randomly quiz you on whether a noun is der, die or das.

A while ago, I was chatting with Steve Finkelstein online about how he wanted to find a good way to learn iPhone development and he mentioned that his job was considering sending him to the iPhone bootcamp by the Big Nerd Ranch. I said that looks interesting and then I saw the price tag: $3850. Wow! I said, he could fly over here and stay at my apartment a few weeks and write an application and it would be a whole lot cheaper than that class! I’d teach him for free and in exchange he would write an app I could sell. Steve actually did end up going to the iPhone Bootcamp and said he thought it was a very good course.

So, that put this idea into my head and I remembered that my friend Jesse Alter just graduated and was looking for a job. I said, “Hey, how about you come visit me in Berlin and learn iPhone dev?” At first he thought it was a crazy idea, but then remembered that through one of his credit cards, he would get $400 back from a travel expense. He originally planned to stay a few nights in some stupid hotel, but decided visiting Berlin would be much cooler. He found a flight for $600, so was able to visit Berlin for a few weeks for around $200. Not bad!

When he arrived, we brainstormed what he could write in three weeks and finally settled upon this language training app. Then, we had to come up with a name and we thought of GermanGender, but it was too long to find under an icon on the iPhone home screen. Then we said, “Why not German Sex?” First I thought there’s no way Apple would accept it, but sex is the linguistic term for noun gender in such languages, so I said let’s go for it.

A few days passed and I received the letter I was half-dreading from Apple. Yes, I bet they’re rejecting it because it has “sex” in the name:

Dear Mr. Smith,

Thank you for submitting German Sex to the App Store. We’ve reviewed German Sex and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it contains objectionable content and is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states:

“Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

It would be appropriate to replace the sound produced by the app when the user selects a wrong answer.

If you believe that you can make the necessary changes so that German Sex does not violate the iPhone SDK Agreement we encourage you to do so and resubmit it for review.

Regards,
iPhone Developer Program

WTF?! They’re rejecting it because they think the wrong answer sounds like a fart! ROFLMAO! Listen to it for yourself: wrong answer. Well, I decided to change the sound anyway, fixed it, uploaded it and sent the following reply to Apple:

Dear iPhone Developer Program,

I have changed the sound for a wrong answer and have resubmitted. I
was unaware that a gameshow buzzer would be offensive, but I am
willing to comply with your recommendation regarding this resource.

Sincerely yours,
Chuck Smith

Several weeks passed with no word, so I was quite happy to see that it was accepted this morning! So, that’s the story behind German Sex, and the $200 3-week European iPhone development immersion trip that led to its creation.

So, if you’d like German Sex, get it in the App Store.