Apple’s Reality Show ‘Planet Of The Apps’ Looks Like ‘Shark Tank’ With More Celebrities

— Recode (@Recode) February 14, 2017

We’ve covered Planet Of The Apps before, but with the uncomfortable feeling that somehow, some way, Apple was messing with us. Come on, a reality show about pitching apps to Will.I.Am And that sense of Apple maybe ever so slightly trolling us has become even stronger with this first trailer.

Here, it turns out, is the basic pitch: Gwyneth Paltrow, Jessica Alba, Will.I.Am, and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk are the judges, and the developer gets on an escalator not unlike the Alpine Climber in The Price Is Right. They’ve got 60 seconds to pitch their app before the escalator takes them to the bottom, in what’s a truly unfortunate visual metaphor, and then they’ll find out whether they’ll get millions of dollars in venture capital, or simply be humiliated in front of everybody who has access to iTunes. They really should have made it an elevator, though, in keeping with company tradition of career-ending humiliation happening in elevators.

On the one hand, we understand the desire to try and punch up the usually rather dull world of software development. Celebrities don’t want to sit in meetings explaining data mining any more than startups want to run those meetings. But still, if Apple’s going to swing for the goofy side of reality shows, at least, we don’t know, make them run an obstacle course or something. Call it Hard Crash!