In recent news, Apple announced the removal of all things cleavage, subsequently removing 5,000 sexual applications from the App Store. However, they did not remove every single provocative app in the store. Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue, as well as Playboy's official app, were both still available after the "clean-up." This led many to believe that Apple was being hypocritical and playing favorite towards large, and powerful, companies.
However, new evidence leads us to believe that perhaps they were just gearing up for a new submission category. Perhaps the two apps mentioned above were already pre-categorized, due to their extremely popular and socially accepted nature. It's unclear why such a route wasn't taken with other apps. Perhaps apps that solely exist to profit from sexually explicit images alone don't have a place in Apple's "technopolis," if you will.
Cult of Mac is reporting that Apple has created a new "Explicit" category for app submissions. The category shows up when someone tries adding a new app to iTunesConnect. Could it be that Apple never intended to permanently ban all boob boucing and sexually related apps? It will be interesting to see what becomes of this new category. So far, nothing "Explicit" has shown up in the App Store since it appeared.
UPDATE: Gizmodo is reporting that the "Explicit" option is now gone. Apple has, apparently, confirmed the removal.
Comments (22)
ReplyAt least it would keep them all in one spot
The G spot... AAAAHHHH YEAAAH ;)
so when are we going to have to prove we're over 18 to use Safari or the media player?
This was totally worth the complete lack of communication with your loyal developers making you BOATLOADS of cash and literally having their livelyhoods put out to pasture with no information coming from you. WTG apple.
QFT
Either you have never had an iPhone or you just don't know how to use yours. The alarm clock can most certainly use iPod songs as the ringer if you know what you are doing.
Without an app? Even the iPod Touch is unable to play music from the library. How pathetic is that? I have 10GB of music and all I can use is 26 simple sounds.
How weird. :S First, kill tons of content about explicit material, then introduce a category for it?
What exactly are they trying to accomplish, besides confusion?
What exactly are they trying to accomplish, besides confusion?
It's all part of Apples latest marketing strategy of appealing to everyone;
Apps removed - Hurrah from morality police.
Apps of big brands not removed - Hurrah from Big Business.
Apps category for explicit content added - Hurrah from Freedom of Expression (etc.) crowd.
& so on.
I can see why this would confuse even the most feeble luddite. Not sure why they removed them like that. But I have to admit it was kind of annoying seeing the amateur booby apps all hoarding the app store. I mean some of these were awful and completely useless. However, I def think there should be an explicit (adults only) category. Would love to see more suicide girls apps and the like. Aside from adult apps, anything that helps raise the bar in the quality of apps is progress. There is a lot of junk in there, which I presume is coming from multi platform developers. I do like the handwarmer app though, works great!
Nothing terrible about this at all.
Apple need to wake up, Girls, Games and Gambling make the most money online, these should be biggest categories in the app store.
They got Games right but I do think it was a bit of an accident and not intentional.
Reminds me of that South Park episode "There's an App for tha... & it's gone..."
Must be fun being a developer, not knowing what whimsical decision Apple may next take.
I agree, I find it very odd how this wasn't done FIRST, and then they MOVED the now deleted explicit apps to that new category.
Was this really too hard? :p
Was that one I didn't see? That reminds me of the importance of saving money episode.
Speaking of whimsical decisions... :)
As regards the South Park gag, yes, thats the episode, sorry mangled my wording a bit on referring to it :)
Okay since no one else seems to have thought of it here - why would a business who charges for entry into their catalog want to remove thousands of the most profitable apps?
My first question would be are they going the CL way and are they going to introduce higher fees for that category? Seems to me to be a money grab of some sort while coming of smelling nice.
My first question would be are they going the CL way and are they going to introduce higher fees for that category? Seems to me to be a money grab of some sort while coming of smelling nice.
What fees are you talking about? There's a standard one-time $99 entrance to submit to the app store and the 70-30 model for paid apps, but that's it.
It's gone again? Christ almighty.
Yeah. How very odd...
How strange. So now the category is gone again? I'm sure there's many app developers upset right now... What happens if you have one of those apps? Does it get removed from the phone? I thought that the iPhone had some sort of backdoor that removed unapproved apps... I don't have one, nor would this be my genre of app, so I wouldn't know.
This is very strange on the part of Apple though...
Think how great it would have been if Apple had any measure of control over the software ecosystem on the PC. :rolleyes: