Apple has threatened to remove Amphetamine from the App Store

I have a story that makes me relate from Microsoft/Skype. A few months after Microsoft acquired Skype, a JIRA ticket was opened by one of the compliance teams at Microsoft with a simple request. Remove the mooning emoji from Skype [1], as it could be considered offensive in some countries and thus Microsoft could be at risk of being sued.

All of Skype erupted. The mooning icon was a symbol of playful cheekiness at Skype and has always been part of the app, and Skype never got sued for over 10 years. There were about 1,200 Skype engineers at the time and that ticket had more than 500 comments from engineers protesting this change. Some made good arguments. Some voiced frustration. Others called that this is a step towards censoring.

It didn’t matter. The icon was removed, the ticket closed.

In a similar vain, I’ll assume that not everyone at Apple will agree with this “violation”. But it won’t matter, as long as the legal teams says it’s a risk to have apps with such names and icons in Apple’s store.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=mooning+skype

Balancing the risk of litigation against risk to the product is management's job. In both of these cases the risk is somewhere between minimal and non-existent.

Big companies tend to have bad management. There are entire libraries of books analyzing why this is the case but the short story is "risk aversion." Employees are incentivized to save their own skin and avoid conflict at work over improving the product.

Sometimes public outcry can create a new risk and change the direction of management.