Heads up, Christmas themed content distribution.

[grekker]

I made a free app with a Christmas theme, but otherwise non-religious content.
After 9 days in QA it failed because of distribution:

SUMMARY: Christmas content won’t be published in specified sensitive countries.
Please modify the country distribution to exclude the following countries:
Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen (in
Middle East and Africa)

Fair enough, but I wonder if I could have known this list of sensitive countries in advance? It is not in the publisher guide. Had I thought of this myself, I probably would have erred on the side of caution, including
all from list of Muslim majority countries.

Based on the current QA throughput I'm a bit pessimistic if this will be published by Christmas. But I still have my hopes up, it is Christmas after all

[Maveric]

HI there, grekker!

Sorry to hear you got delayed with this, even though the facts were stated in the list you specified.

I hope that after you had posted this, maybe the reasoning could really be made better visible.

And also that it could be taken in consideration and perhaps now hurry with your application.

Best Regards,
Marko

[mdwh]

I can understand why a publisher might choose to focus on certain countries, but it seems rather worrying to enforce restricted distribution, just because some people in a country might be offended. Incidentally, the Wikipedia link below also makes it clear that even in the Muslim majority countries, the proportion is far from 100%. And for example, in Iraq, there are still 3%, or a whopping 636,000 Christians ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_Iraq ). From a developer point of view, it's a reduced market. From a user point of view, it means you can't see things you might want, based on Nokia's assumptions about what the "majority" rule in your country is.

Is there a full list of themes that would have to be restricted, and what countries they would have to be censored for? It would be useful to help developers avoid the problem that the OP experienced here.

And speaking as a user - are there any apps that might be blocked in my country (the UK), because Nokia thinks some people might be offended? (Would atheist themes be blocked because more than 50% are Christians? Or would Islamic apps be blocked, because they are less than 3% in the UK? Presumably not - yes I know those examples are silly, but that's the same kind of thing. We shouldn't propagate the myths that countries belong to a single religion, or that people should be labelled by the religion of their country - there are still individuals there. The official state religion of the UK is Christianity, but I'm most certainly an atheist...)