Apple appears to be cleansing the iPhone App Store of adult content, with several developers saying their sex-themed apps were suddenly removed.
The first report of disappearing apps came from TechCrunch, which received a letter reportedly sent to developer Jon Atherton. "Your application, Wobble iBoobs (Premium Uncensored), contains content that we had originally believed to be suitable for distribution," the letter says, in part. "However, we have recently received numerous complaints from our customers about this type of content, and have changed our guidelines appropriately."
Apple encouraged Atherton to resubmit his app if he felt it could be modified to comply with the new rules, which don't allow "overtly sexual content" -- a pretty vague guideline, if you ask me.
Other iPhone apps with sexual themes have been disappearing throughout the day. BusinessInsider notes that 17 apps from On the Go Girls were purged, and prolific sex app developer Jens Ltd. has only one app remaining in the store. Several apps from Maxim were removed, but Playboy's app remains. Developers weren't told in advance about the policy change, and Apple hasn't commented to the press so far.
I haven't downloaded any of these apps (honest!), but the principle of it rubs me the wrong way. When Apple released version 3.0 of the iPhone OS, it included parental controls, which is why adult-themed apps were allowed to exist in the first place. Users can set age gates at several levels for apps, music and video, and they can lock the restrictions with a four-digit code.
It's possible that Apple doesn't want the App Store to be overrun with adult-themed apps, because they make the store look bad. Even with parental controls enabled, you can still search the App Store and browse all the adult-themed apps. But if that's the concern, Apple should address it by sectioning off a part of the app store and making it inaccessible to younger users, kind of like the opaque plastic wrappers that cover up adult magazines at the newsstand. Punishing developers and users is a bad call by Apple, and the perfect example of what's wrong with the Apple App Store.
