Apple last week began banning iPhone apps containing "overtly sexual content." But on Monday the company said it intends to leave apps from major publishers, such as Playboy and Sports Illustrated, untouched.
In an interview with The New York Times, Apple's vice president of marketing Phil Schiller explained the company was responding to complaints from concerned parents and female customers.
“It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see,” Schiller told NY Times' Jenna Wortham.
Though the move is sure to mitigate complaints, and even please some developers turned off by raunchy content cluttering the App Store, it's questionable why the Playboy and Sports Illustrated apps, which contain images of partially nude women, wouldn't offend the same customers. Schiller explained that the Playboy and Sports Illustrated apps came from more reputable companies.
“The difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format,” Schiller said.
The retroactive kind-of-sort-of ban of sex-tinged apps is certainly leaving some developers sore. Wortham interviewed Fred Clarke, co-president of a small software company called On the Go Girls, who lost 50 apps as a result of the ban. Clarke had been making thousands of dollars off the App Store, but no longer.
"It’s very hard to go from making a good living to zero,” he said. “This goes farther than sexy content. For developers, how do you know you aren’t going to invest thousands into a business only to find out one day you’ve been cut off?"
Apple from day one has said porn was not allowed in the App Store, so developers instead coded apps that contained only partial nudity. (Some were able to sneak full nudity into their apps, but not for long before Apple slammed the ban hammer.) Apple last year implemented a Parental Controls feature to prevent children from downloading content that Apple deemed "17+." However, the feature still allows the App Store to display search results for 17+ content even if an iPhone has been configured to prohibit downloading such apps. Clearly, the Parental Controls tool has not been effective in addressing parents' concerns.
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