Linux on your iPhone

So, it's April Fool's day again, and this time I came up with quite a nice joke. Sadly, things haven't worked out, so I figured I'd tell you what I had planned so at least you know that I tried!

As an April Fool's joke, I created a fake Linux app for the iPhone that made it look like Linux was running on your phone. It doesn't actually do anything - when you type text, it just spits out one of several pre-determined responses, but there are various geeky in-jokes for people in the know. The idea was that you'd buy it knowing it was fake (it was made very clear in the app description), then show it to your Linuxy friends, say "hey, I installed Linux on my iPhone!" and see how long it took for them to figure out it was a joke.

Sadly, Apple rejected the app for various reasons. First, they said that people might see the warning messages and think their iPhone had crashed. To be fair, the original version of the app showed this screen after trying to run X:

So, even though the app was called "Fake Linux" and it was pretty clear that it was just a joke, I added a big warning screen to the front re-assuring people that everything they saw within the app was just a joke and was nothing to worry about. When you tapped it, the app would wait a few seconds so you could walk to your colleague's desk, then run as normal. It looked like this:

It's just a joke. It's just a game. It's just a simulation. It's not real. Good enough? No - it was rejected again, for the same reason - people might see the error messages and think they are real. The splash screen? "The splash screen is not relevant," said Apple. Still, at least they were polite enough to call me and explain.

The next stop for me was to do a search and replace for the word "error" and replace it to "notice" - I decided that even "warning" was a bit risky given Apple's kid gloves approach to users. I also changed the "broken X" picture to be a welcome screen, so it now looked like this:

So: no mention at all of warnings, errors or similar. It's now just a simple app that prints text responding to what you type. Surely that would be enough? No. This time, Apple gave a pretty final rejection, again by phone, saying "it emulates Linux... that's not something we would accept."

Putting aside for a moment the fact that they could have told me that four weeks ago, I have a pretty fundamental issue with this response from Apple: Fake Linux doesn't emulate Linux at all. All it does is read the text that comes in, and prints some text that looks appropriate. It doesn't run any commands. It doesn't do anything other than print out text. Yes, it has some stupid geeky jokes in there that poke fun at some of Linux's more common flaws: PulseAudio fails to run; X doesn't work; Emacs crashes with an out-of-memory error; and so on. But these are all quite innocent.

To give you an idea of how it works, here's an actual chunk of the source code:

if (ArrayStartsWithString(parts, @"sudo")) {
	if ([parts count] == 1) {
		AddHistoryLine(@"usage: sudo [-n] -h | -K | -k | -L | -V | -v");
		AddHistoryLine(@"usage: sudo -l[l] [-AnS] [-g groupname|#gid] [-U username] [-u username|#uid] [-g groupname|#gid] [command]");
		AddHistoryLine(@"usage: sudo [-AbEHnPS] [-C fd] [-g groupname|#gid] [-p prompt] [-u username|#uid] [-g groupname|#gid] [VAR=value] [-i|-s] []");
		AddHistoryLine(@"usage: sudo -e [-AnS] [-C fd] [-g groupname|#gid] [-p prompt] [-u username|#uid] file ...");				
	} else {
		// remove the sudo part and run the command as per normal
		[parts removeObjectAtIndex:0];
	}
}

if (ArrayStartsWithString(parts, @"ls")) {
	if (([command compare:@"ls -l"] == NSOrderedSame) || ([command compare:@"ls -ls"] == NSOrderedSame) || ([command compare:@"ls -lsh"] == NSOrderedSame)) {
		AddHistoryLine(@"-r--r--r-- 1 root root   512  2010-03-01 18:07 README");
	} else if ([command compare:@"ls -a"] == NSOrderedSame) {
		AddHistoryLine(@".");
		AddHistoryLine(@"..");
		AddHistoryLine(@"README");			
	} else if ([command compare:@"ls -la"] == NSOrderedSame) {
		AddHistoryLine(@"drwxr-xr-x 33 root root  4096  2010-03-01 18:07 .");
		AddHistoryLine(@"drwxr-xr-x 3 root root   4096  2010-03-01 18:07 ..");
		AddHistoryLine(@"-r--r--r-- 1 root root   512   2010-03-01 18:07 README");	
	} else {
		AddHistoryLine(@"README");
	}
} else if (ArrayStartsWithString(parts, @"uname")) {
	if ([parts count] == 1) {
		AddHistoryLine(@"Linux");
	} else {
		AddHistoryLine(@"Linux iPhone 2.6.32 #53-iPhone SMP Tue Dec 8 04:01:29 UTC 2009 ARMv7 GNU/Linux");
	}
} else if ([command compare:@"pwd"] == NSOrderedSame) {
	AddHistoryLine(@"/root");
// and so on...

Yes, it's just a load of "if" statements that read what was typed and print out messages.

And, because it's April 1st and people probably think this is some sort of cunning meta-April-fools thing, here's a video of the app running on the iPhone Simulator:

Am I upset? A little, but it's OK - if you want to release on the App Store, you have to play by Apple's rules, even when those rules seem a little crazy. And Apple has managed to sell quite a few copies of my iPhone game, Brain Party (which is now open source! for Linux users!), so I can't really complain too much - I just wish they'd lighten up a bit!