Opinion: Apple Vetoes AppStore Nudity
With the addition of parental controls in OS 3.0, some couldn’t help but speculate that some risque adult content might soon be making its way to the AppStore. It didn’t take long for the first nip slip to appear. Hottest Girls, an app which had been available prior to the 3.0 upgrade and featured scantily-clad images of young ladies in lingerie, took advantage of it’s new 17+ rating to expose a little bit of booby. It didn’t last too long though, and Apple soon made it’s feelings on the subject clear;
Apple will not distribute applications that contain inappropriate content, such as pornography. The developer of this application added inappropriate content directly from their server after the application had been approved and distributed, and after the developer had subsequently been asked to remove some offensive content. This was a direct violation of the terms of the iPhone Developer Program. The application is no longer available on the App Store.
But while Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr may have taken this stance in a comment made to CNN.com’s Wes Finley-Price, there are still questions that remain unanswered. Why does the iPhone Developer Program allow developers to make changes directly from the server in the first place? Shouldn’t there be a system in place that restricts any changes to an app without a formal Apple approved update? And if Apple “will not distribute applications that contain inappropriate content, such as pornography,” then why do they issue a rating that includes the warning “Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity”? What are they expecting? Tasteful, non-pornagraphic frequent and intense nudity? Outside of a breast-cancer self-exam or a medical app, I can’t imagine an app with frequent nudity. And I certainly wouldn’t expect an app like that to have a 17+ rating, would you?
Apple doesn’t want to be seen as condoning pornography, and that’s understandable. But pornography is about intent. Covered breasts or not, Hottest Girls was approved by Apple. If that’s the sort of content that does get approved, I can’t see why they’d have an issue with a parental-controlled version of the exact same software showing off a little bit of the boob.
That’s right, the 17+ rating is intended for depiction of drug use, adult situations and themes, and intense violence (including decapitations, other severed limbs, exploding guts, blood, and more). But no absolutely no boobs, because that would be crossing the line.
Gotta love the “puritan” US of A where it’s okay to have a 14 year old kid watch images of people getting shot and blown up, but not okay to show boobs. Also note, there is a strong distinction between erotic images (showing nude women) and explicit pornography (sex acts), which I don’t think should be shown to a younger audience.
“Why does the iPhone Developer Program allow developers to make changes directly from the server in the first place?”
If they disallowed content changes server side there would be no Facebook app, nothing to check for movies or weather, hell no Safari access because those applications access content on servers that aren’t controlled by Apple.