Apple recently banned Phone Story from Itunes. As reported by the Guardian, the app features:

…four mini-games about the “troubling supply chain” behind smartphones – all smartphones, not specifically iPhones – including coltan extraction in Congo, outsourced labour in China, environmental waste in Pakistan, as well as the mania for gadgets in the West. One of the mini-games sees workers leaping from their factory building: a clear reference to suicides and attempted suicides by workers at Apple’s manufacturing partner Foxconn.

A game where you have to catch plummeting factory employees, oversee underage miners and distribute smartphones outside a store with a white pear logo on the front? Apple’s disapproval comes as no surprise.

The act of banning it drew more criticism for Apple on the topical issues surrounding resources from the Congo, and a timely hoax refutation by Apple only added to the fire. As the media release states:

Apple wishes to inform the public that the so-called “conflict-free” iPhone, promoted today outside the Apple Store at Fifth Avenue in New York City, featured on the non-Apple website www.apple-CF.com, and noted in a spoofed media advisory to numerous New York City reporters, is fraudulent and fictitious, and entirely the imagination of the group of pranksters who created it.

To be perfectly clear, this product does not exist, and Apple has no connection to the group that promoted it. Furthermore, although Apple does have plans to certify its materials as conflict-free, this will by no means be any sort of solution to the situation of conflict in the Congo, nor in any way help bring an end to that conflict. 

There are various possible solutions to this problem, but it is up to you, not Apple, to accomplish them… We at Apple have acknowledged in the past that the conflict in the Congo, which has claimed many millions of lives, is fuelled in part by the provision of minerals that go into consumer electronic products, and not only Apple’s. However, so-called “conflict-free” certification is not a real solution, merely a very tiny part of a real solution. Regardless of whether Apple or other companies produce “conflict-free” products, the Congo conflict will not end until the U.S. government chooses to enforce its own laws.

The app was quickly adapted for Android here and is still available. The apps producers, Italian developer Molleindustria, have a stated mission to “reappropriate video games as a popular form of mass communication” and “investigate the persuasive potentials of the medium by subverting mainstream video gaming cliche”. Full points for subtlety and slipping this one through the cracks.