Apple is doing a good job of driving developers to circumvent the official App Store and users to jailbreak their iPhones. The company has rejected another useful application, Angelo DiNardi’s MailWrangler, because it “duplicates the functionality of the built-in iPhone application Mail.”
In a post to his blog, DiNardi says his application, which allows users to add and access multiple Gmail accounts, “simply directly loading and showing Gmail inside of an application,” adding “How you can confuse Gmail with Mail.app I’m not sure.”
MailWrangler also lets users see threaded views and Google contacts, archive (quickly), star messages and get more functionality missing from Apple’s Mail.app.
Apple previously rejected Podcaster–an iPhone application that lets people download podcasts directly to their devices without going through iTunes–from the App Store. It also removed NetShare, an application that allows the iPhone to be tethered (used as a wireless modem), encouraging some users to jailbreak (enable unofficial application installation) their phones and install the easy-to-use iPhoneModem tethering tool.
DiNardi quips: “I guess I should just write another flashlight or glowstick application to actually get published. That’s the only apps Apple seems to want in the store.”
