Apple Removes 5,000 Sexy Apps from App Store

A couple of months ago, I mentioned that in recent years Apple’s negative press seemed to be on a rise. As it stands today, I don’t think that was an inaccurate statement, as it just keeps coming, and all for good reason. The most recent happening has to do with the removal of about 5,000 apps from the App Store, all of which had a sexy theme. Boobs apparently have no place on the iPhone, which is ironic since I always thought you had to be a boob to use one (I’m kidding!).

Apple seems to have been a bit hypocritical with its decision to remove all these apps en masse, though, because while it states that the move was made due to complaints from women, it left a couple similar commercial apps alone. Of these, one is Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit 2010, and the other, an app from Playboy. Obviously, when you think of sexy anything, these two names aren’t unknown’s.

Phil Schiller, the vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing for Apple, spoke out last week regarding the company’s decision, but he seems to have completely ignored the company’s hypocrisy, which to many is the real problem. It’s somewhat understandable that Apple may want to keep its store clean, but to remove thousands of similar apps and to leave some is without question hypocritical.

As TechCrunch points out, there’s even more to the issue. I think few would disagree that a mother has a right to block certain content on devices she buys for her children, and from that standpoint, I can understand the concern. But the problem is, Apple has built-in content security settings that this exact area should be part of. If the app is risqué and not intended for children, then it could easily be marked as such and blocked depending on the security setting. It seems like a completely simple solution to the problem, but instead, it’s as though Apple prefers the press, even if it’s bad.

And for what it’s worth, despite all of these apps being removed, it does virtually nothing to keep adult content out of the hands of young children. All of the apps that were removed weren’t even of a pornographic nature, and I don’t think anyone is naive enough to believe that there isn’t much, much worse out there on the world wide Web. Thanks to the Safari Web browser, it’s all just a click away.

Problem number two is that Apple is breaking a golden rule: don’t take away what you’ve already given (in this case, to both developers and users). Apple has not always allowed these sexy apps in the App Store. But at some point over the past several months they changed their minds and apps like “Asian Boobs” started getting accepted. Why did they do it? At the time, the thought was that with the new parental controls in the iPhone OS 3.0, they could leave it up to parents to decide what their children can or cannot download/use.