John Gruber, best known for inventing the Markdown publishing format, recently raved about Phoneys, a very popular sticker pack for iMessage, saying, "This is very clever, and I can see how it could be damn funny, but I wouldn't be surprised if Phoneys gets pulled from the App Store."
The sticker pack shot up the number 1 spot for top paid and top grossing app in the iMessage App Store, but what is it about the sticker pack that egged John Gruber to forecast its impending doom?
Adam Howell, the creator of Phoneys, took to Medium to set up a narrative. He says that in just 24 hours that the app climbed into instantaneous popularity, he received a phone call from a guy from Apple named Bill.
"Bill was nice, but to the point," says Howell. Bill informed him that Apple's lawyers weren't too pleased with Phoneys, and the fact that it passed the thorough review process that Apple administers for every iMessage app contributed to the lawyers getting vexed.
Just what is Phoneys? What has warranted it to garner the attention it currently has with iPhone users? And why did it attract an ominous memo from Apple's lawyers? Well, Phoneys is a sticker app, one of many now available for the iMessage app on iOS 10. Replacing messages with nifty and wacky little stickers or adding decorative and playful animations in an iMessage thread is old news, and the apps available on the iMessage App Store mirrored those features mentioned: humorous, funny and sometimes touching.
Phoneys, while retaining the humor aspect, is slightly problematic. It's a sticker pack that looks exactly like the blue message bubbles on iMessage containing text when a friend sends you a message. The bubbles look the same font-wise and style-wise, and they're embedded with compliments. "You're hilarious" or "Can I have your autograph" or even "You're my hero." They're chock full of pleasant, well-meaning platitudes that you can place on top of messages sent by other people. So for example, when someone sends you a hurtful or mean-natured text, you can slap on a Phoneys sticker, and the original message will be buried under the new, much nicer compliment.
Phoneys is atypical of the bunch of humorous and fairly benign apps on the iMessage App Store. It was essentially a prank app, and Apple doesn't sit well with prank apps. Bill told Howell that they weren't planning to yank the app from the iMessage App Store. Instead, he gave Howell a few guidelines on changes to be implemented, giving him a week to fulfill them.
"The stickers couldn't be blue or green, they couldn't use San Francisco as the typeface, and the app could no longer be marketed as a 'prank' app, because Apple doesn't approve prank apps," says Howell on Medium. Apple told Howell that Phoneys should not, in any way, look similar to the blue message bubbles, and advised him to water it down to a sort of comic book bubble aesthetic.
"[T]he entire spirit of the app will be lost in a less fun and much less clever 'comic book cartoon bubbles' version," says Howell. "I'm honestly not sure what I'm going to do."
Howell has until Thursday to either revamp the app or pull it entirely from the App Store, two options he fancies neither, but one thing is for sure: this is the last time we'll ever see a developer create an app along the lines of Phoneys, if Apple's against it. Those of you who want to try it before it possibly disappears from the store or is converted to a comic book-style speech bubble can do so now.
