Apple has long been an icon for quality products, but its overflowing iOS App Store is a crapshoot: Nuggets of quality are buried in a vast, steaming heap of inanity. In fact, the man who oversees the App Store process runs a side business selling fart and urination apps.

Phillip Shoemaker, director of applications technology at Apple, who runs the App Store process, sells iPhone apps in the App Store under the company name Gray Noodle. (UPDATE:* Shoemaker updated and deleted some of his social networking profiles when informed of Wired.com's story. See bottom of the post for more details and archived pages.*) Titles include a fart app called Animal Farts (above, left and middle), a urination simulator called iWiz (above, right) and a refrigerator-magnet app called Medical Poetry.

Gray Noodle's seven apps range from $1 to $2. Two apps received two-star ratings, one app received one star, one app scored 3 1/2, and the others have zero reviews.

"Simulate the experience of urinating for a long time," iWiz's app description reads in iTunes. "Convince your friends that you'll never stop. IWiz allows you to simulate urination: faster, slower or just a trickle."

The game Animal Farts features various cartoon images of animals with their buttocks facing forward, giving users buttons to trigger "Fart," "Poot," "Drop" or "Wiz" sounds accompanied with animations illustrating said emissions.

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Shoemaker, who has been frequently cited in news stories as one of the top decision makers enforcing rules when evaluating apps for approval or rejection, did not respond to a phone call or an e-mail requesting comment.

An Apple spokeswoman said Shoemaker was hired partly because of his background as a developer.

"Phillip's apps were written, submitted and approved before he became an Apple employee," an Apple spokeswoman said in a statement. "His experience and perspective as a developer is one of the valuable things he brings to Apple's developer relations team. Apple's policy allows for employees to have apps on the App Store if they're developed and published prior to their start at Apple."

In fact, three of the seven apps in the App Store owned by Gray Noodle were published after March 9, 2009, when Shoemaker tweeted he had started working at Apple. The app iWiz was published April 17, 2009, and Medical Poetry and 101 Cocktails were published March 27, 2009, according to iTunes.

Typically, Apple employees are prohibited from selling apps in the App Store unless they gain special permission from an executive as part of a policy to avoid conflicts of interest, according to Evan Doll, a former senior iPhone software engineer at Apple. Doll left Apple about a year ago to start his own company, which now produces the popular Flipboard iPad app for reading news content.

"Apple employees are generally prohibited," Doll told Wired.com. "You have to get a special exception from a VP. Otherwise, big no-no."

"If he was doing it pre-Apple then he'd have an easier time getting an exception," he added.

Ever since the App Store opened in 2008, Apple has been scrutinized repeatedly for its opaque App Store review policies regulating the types of content allowed inside the store. Apple still has not published or disclosed editorial guidelines about the type of content allowed in the iOS store.

Apple's App Store serves over 225,000 apps, and only 5 percent of the 15,000 wares submitted each week are rejected, usually for technical reasons, according to Steve Jobs. But Apple in the past has rejected apps because they had "limited utility" or displayed "overtly sexual content," and the company has repeatedly come under fire for inconsistent decision making.

For example, Apple in February began removing apps displaying partial nudity, but the company opted to allow similar apps from bigger media companies such as Sports Illustrated and Playboy to stay inside the store. Phil Schiller, Apple's vice president of marketing, explained then that developers had begun submitting "an increasing number of apps containing very objectionable content" and the company was addressing complaints from women and parents.

"It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see," Schiller told the New York Times.

Apple has no policy against apps depicting flatulence or other bodily emissions – indeed, its App Store is often criticized for containing too many such apps. (A search for the word "fart" returns 745 iPhone apps and 37 iPad apps.)

Still, it comes off as hypocritical that a director of the App Store sells apps that some might call inappropriate, said Ben Kahle, developer of Me So Holy, a satiric religious app that Apple rejected in mid-2009 for containing "objectionable material." Kahle said after he re-submitted the app to the store, an Apple employee called him and said Me So Holy would "never" be approved.

"If they're going to do things like this why can't I do apps like Me So Holy?" Kahle said. "Especially when the guy in charge is doing shit like this."

Update: When informed of our story, Shoemaker purged his Twitter account cited throughout the story and updated his LinkedIn profile to remove mention of Gray Noodle. However, Wired.com archived the webpages, available for download [zip]. Also, a cached version of his LinkedIn profile and multiple iPhone app aggregation websites* point to Shoemaker as the owner** of Gray Noodle.*

Brian X. Chen is author of an upcoming book about the always-connected mobile future titled Always On, due for publication Spring 2011. To keep up with his coverage on Wired.com, follow @bxchen or @gadgetlab.

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