Get the original, banned and rejected iStrip! – Now Closed

Obscene and offensive!

UPDATE (Feb 12): The Competition is now closed. No More iTunes vouchers will be given away.

iStrip has been rejected for inclusion in the App Store several times on the grounds that it contains potentially obscene and offensive material. It never did.

Now you can find out for youself, because we are making the original photo of our vintage model available for all iStrip fans!

iStrip allows you to add custom “bathing suit fabrics” from your photo library. Of course, they don’t need to be fabrics. You could add drawings or photographs. Anything you like, really.

Simply email us a screenshot of iStrip using your favourite “fabric” and we will send you the original bikini model photo. You can then import this to your photo library on the iPhone and use iStrip as it was always intended to work.

Send your favourite iStrip screenshot to istrip@rockcottageindustries.com and we will reply with the full size image of our vintage iStrip model. You can now download the original image from the iStrip page on this site.

We will publish the best screenshots we receive on this website. Let us know in your email if you want your name to be listed along with your image.

To our favourite entries we will award $10 gift vouchers for the US iTunes store. (The competition is now CLOSED) BUT So keep those screenshots coming.

(Btw, we will not publish anything offensive)

iStrip has launched as Novelty App

Today the very first application we ever wrote for the iPhone has finally been approved! It’s original name was iStrip and we submitted it in August of 2007 for review. iStrip was a virtual stripper pen, a gimmick that boys used to play with when we were young in the 1970s.

iStrip was quickly rejected, because apparently it lacked “utility for the wider iPhone user community” (despite it being submitted to the ‘Entertainment’ category).

Offensive material?

In December we made another attempt to get it published by adding a bit more ‘utility’ to it: a clock. This time we were told very directly that the app contained “offensive material”. This material was a woman in a bikini on the vintage 1960s photograph we used for our background. This version is the one you can see in the iStrip video on YouTube and AppTheater.

So we thought, let’s made the bikini bigger. At some point it has to stop being offensive, right? To make it more fun, we actually added the ability to choose bathing suit styles. Who could be offended by this? But no luck iStrip Clock did not get approved.

So in our final attempt we changed the name to “Novelty App”, changed the icon a bit and submitted the application as a game, stating that it contains ‘mild mature themes’. And guess what, this time it worked! Novelty App is now available in the App Store.

One great feature of Novelty App is that it allows you to pick one of your own photos as the bathing suit pattern. This opens up a few interesting possibilities :)