Apple on Thursday took the unusual step of responding to a story about an iPhone app that had reportedly been censored by Apple to get into the App Store. However, Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, said in an email to John Gruber at Daring Fireball that the app had not been censored by Apple at all.

“Apple did not censor the content in this developer’s application and Apple did not reject this developer’s application for including references to common swear words,” said Schiller.

Schiller said the problem Apple had with the app was that it included references to more “vulgar” terms found at Wiktionary.org, not the common swear words that had been reported in the press. Apple suggested to the developer that he resubmit the app once parental controls were released as part of iPhone OS 3.0.

Here’s the part I think everyone was upset with Apple about, that they didn’t really have any part in.

“Apple did not ask the developer to censor any content in Ninjawords, the developer decided to do that themselves in order to get to market faster,” said Schiller. “Even though the developer chose to censor some terms, there still remained enough vulgar terms that it required a parental control rating of 17+.”

That makes sense now. Glad to see Schiller set the record straight.