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Last night @rustyshelf began a lengthy dialog of tweets with other developers about how his iPad app, My Frame, was being removed from The App Store by Apple for seemingly vague reasons.  Here are some key tweets to get up to speed:

• Just got off the Phone with Apple, they are going to pull My Frame out of the App Store! Get it while you still can! http://bit.ly/b1m2wr
• @xavierverhoeven no they are cracking down on ‘widget’ style apps. Ours isn’t a widget app it’s a photo frame!
• Got a response from Steve Jobs: “We are not allowing apps that create their own desktops. Sorry.” on the My Frame removal.

Apple has been known to shift its app approval policies in the past, but this case is especially interesting for several reasons: 

• New policies have often come in the form of new approval criteria applied henceforth rather than going back and removing the offending apps.
• Past policy changes have made sense like removing pornography, enforcing a minimum level of functionality, and banning cookie-cutter apps.  But this new policy lacks an obvious business reason for removal.
• Steve Jobs’ reply indicates that he is privy to the new App Store guideline.  It seems unlikely that he would spend his time investigating the minor issue in order to reply to the e-mail, so he must have already had knowledge of the new policy.  This implies that App Store approval criteria aren’t conjured up deep within the Apple org chart, but are approved by Jobs himself.

Of course, Apple approval criteria fervor is so common place now, this is just another day in The App Store.

UPDATE: @rustyshelf just published a blog post with more details.  Find it here: http://shiftyjelly.wordpress.com/2010/06/01/sentence-first-verdict-afterwards/