File this under suspicious. A few days after indie developer Tommy Refenes devoted his GDC rant to trashing Apple’s App Store, the app he used to highlight the problem, Zits & Giggles, was pulled from the store.

One of the problems with Apple is that the company hasn’t always been clear about its actions, especially regarding App Store approvals. So only the people who pulled the app from the store know why it was removed.

There are two reasons I can think of that the app would be removed.

The first is that the app violated some part of Apple’s secret code regarding apps, but had flown under the radar until the rant pointed a lot of attention Zits & Giggles‘ way. Refenes said he had been raising the price of the app every time he checked on it, and it was up to about $400.

Apple has removed at least one app for being priced stupidly high. The company removed the app I Am Rich because it charged $999.99 and did virtually nothing. So there is some precedent for removing expensive apps.

The second is a more worrying possibility. The removal could be retribution for Refenes’ rant. And if Apple pulled his app in retaliation, then they’ve validated his argument.

Which is funny, because I don’t really agree with Refenes. The App Store is terrible for a lot of reasons. It takes a big cut of developers’ revenue, it’s full of low quality games and apps, and, as evidenced above, it’s an inscrutable gatekeeper.

But Refenes doesn’t make any logical connections in his rant. He starts out saying the App Store is awful, but doesn’t support the argument. He tries to argue that the iPod and iPhone are the Tiger Handhelds of this generation, but only succeeds in proving that bad ports of popular games, like Mega Man 2, Sonic and Street Fighter IV are similar to those crappy handhelds.

Popular titles are always going to be big sellers, even if they aren’t suited to the medium. First-person shooters still control like crap on consoles, but how many came out even before Halo introduced a moderately useful control scheme?

And his experiment with Zits & Giggles, which resulted in 14 people buying it at $299, doesn’t prove that the App Store is a failure, it just proves that some people have too much money to spend, or don’t read the prices, or put more value on expensive things. It reflects a tiny fraction of the App Store userbase.

To draw the conclusion that the people who buy games on the App Store aren’t gamers from those two examples is a bit of a reach.

If Apple had left things alone, the rant would have been remembered for the amusing story of a crappy app selling a lot of copies at an exhorbitatnt price. But now Apple is likely to suffer the Streisand effect.

Regardless of why the app was removed, people are going to assume that it was removed because of the rant.

Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe public outcry will get Apple to change their ways and open up the app approval and removal processes. But if history is any indicator, all the complaints will fall on deaf ears.

[Hat tip Ben Abraham]