Apple rears its ugly head again when it rejects a perfectly working, legally-licensed, copyright-noted, previously-agreed-upon application from entering its App Store. The latest victim: a Commodore 64 emulator.

iPhone developer Manomio had pulled all the stops it needed to hurdle over to get their application up, running, and available, including securing the licenses for redistribution from Commodore Gaming, and an informal go-ahead thumbs up from Apple to continue development. But when it finished the Commodore 64 emu for the iPhone, it was shot down with an in-your-face rejection from Apple concerning breaches in its SDK.

Thank you for submitting C64 1.0 to the App Store. We’ve reviewed C64 1.0 and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it violates the iPhone SDK Agreement; “3.3.2 An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).”

Granted, the application, by nature, would probably perform operations that breach this, but the thing is, why would Apple give the go-ahead if this would happen anyway? It seems that Apple was too underhanded to realize that while their App Store reviews are too stringent, they lack that when it comes to stuff like this.