Steve Jobs Personally Rejects Apple App Tracking Radiation

Tweet

Some might take issue with Steve Jobs’ latest rejection of an iPhone app, or at least the reasoning behind it, but apparently Jobs himself put out the word that there would be “no interest” in an app that detects radiation in their cell phones.

An Israeli company, Tawkon, put together an app that lets you gauge the radiation your phone is emitting. After several attempts to get it into the app store, culminating last August in a magnificently abrupt email from Jobs himself reading simply “No interest.” (and ironically closed, “Sent from my iPhone.”), Tawkon took matters into its own hands and spread word about how to hack their iPhones into being able to run Tawkon’s radiation meter app.

Tawkon’s radiation detector–which measures the cellular radiation emissions of your phone, and also lets you see where a phone call might expose you to unusually high levels of radiation so that you can avoid making calls from those areas–has been available on Blackberry’s App World since last May, and followed up on the Android Market in September. Apple, the only holdout, refused access, so Tawkon promptly told people how to pull an end run around Apple and get a radiation detector on their iPhones.

Some suggest that the action may be personal, given that Tawkon issued reports back during Antennagate that, once the iPhone was clutched in a death grip, the radiation it emitted spiked. And while whether that’s the case or not is unclear, one thing is: it should have been put on the App Store to begin with. How Jobs knew that none of his potential customers would have been interested in such an app–especially when it was already on two other app stores–is beyond me. Let it sink or swim on its own merits, says I, not cut out the entire concept to begin with.

So if you’re looking to check your iPhone’s radiation, you likely won’t have an easy time of it, Tawkon’s help notwithstanding.