Thought that would get your attention.

Apple has just gone through the APP store with a flamethrower, torching all the apps it can find that have salacious, tittilating, etc. content in them.  Now I, for one, don’t care much about pr0n, one way or the other.  Teenage boys and girls will find *something* to masturbate to, even if it’s stick-figures drawn in ketchup (ever wonder why so many music videos have long shots of bouncing pop-stars shown from the waist up? yeah, because it looks like they’re having sex.  Ever wonder why your dad bought you a subscription to Natl. Geographic?  Because you mom won’t get as pissed if you’re looking at “cultural” nudity.  Go figure.)  I would rather not have it show up during my Saturday morning cartoons, but the fact that regular old pr0n is out there doesn’t really trip my trigger at all, as long as you actually have to go out and burn a couple of calories finding it.

As for leaving up the SI and Playboy apps?  I can see the reasoning there.  Lets face it, everyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the past 60 years knows who those companies are and what they do.  A parent can choose to have them banned or blocked, it’s a no-brainer, its easy to do.  If I’m browzing through the app store and run across iBoobs, guess what, I’m probably not going to download it, it’s not my thing.  But if I see a copy of hangman on my kids phone, I’m probably not going to think twice unless I see it being played and note that the”man” is actually a pr0n starlet and instead of drawing limbs it’s taking off her shirt.

iWiggle.  These are the guys who cried foul in the first place.  And the App has been called out before for being…  tittilating.  It gets around by providing only a jiggle “tool” not the images to be jiggled.  I’m okay with that part.  The fact that the “app video” basically shows the process by which you can make a swimsuit model’s boobs jiggle?  Okay, now you’re getting snarky.  You could have included baseball bobbleheads or some other reason to jiggle and let the “community” run with the boobs thing.  We’re clever that way, if you give us a jiggle app, we *are* going to jiggle boobs with it, have some faith in your audience.  By handing us the “boobie” concept. you shot yourself inthe foot.  Your ability to cry “foul” just went out the window and you have Apple the ammo they needed to pull your app.

But whatever my opinion about the apps in question, I have to cry foul on Apple for this.  The app store approval process has been plagued by personal opinion since it opened.  Apps that feature naked breasts (like on Tarot cards or art museums) have been rejected as being too pornographic, while other apps designed to tittilate (strip-poker for example) have been allowed to slide.  There has been enough personal opinion injected on the part of the review team that a developer has a hard time getting through the process, even with apps that are designed to fall under “parody” law rather than involving tittilation.  So it’s no wonder the policy needs a revamp.  I’m okay with a revamp.  However, going through the existing app store and stripping these developers of their products *after the fact* is just crap.  The products were approved.  They made it through your approval process.  At the VERY LEAST you owed them a bit of class, a warning that the app would be taken down on a specific date and a specific critique of the app, detailing out how it violated the new policy.

But instead, we hear that these apps have been pulled *while* the policy is still under discussion.  It hasn’t even been finalized?  If you’re going to pull that kind of control-freek BS, then you better be willing to pull the Playboy and Swimsuit Illustrated apps as well until the new policy is finalized and in place.   It’s *your* store.  No shirt, no service, we *get* that, but if that’s going to be the policy, then you have to bring down the hammer and make it the policy across the board, make the big dawgs get in line with the scrappy pipsqueaks, otherwise you’re turning app approval into a kind of political process that is going to alienate all the innovators you have tried so hard to court.