Sex might sell, but Apple doesn’t care. If you’ve browsed the App Store before, you may have found that a large portion of apps are what we like to call “risqué.” Apple’s position on this topic has never been concrete in nature, and they’ve changed their mind yet again. Last week, Bill Stiteler wrote about Apple’s removal of some specific sexy apps on the App Store, but more details have surfaced since then.
As you can see on the graph above from AppShopper, the bulk of these dangerously sexy apps were removed on February 18th. A normal day may see around 100 apps removed, but on the 18th nearly 4,000 were taken down. It’s said that, in all, over 5,000 apps were removed as a result of “numerous complaints,” or so says Apple. This is a significant decision considering that this accounts for about 5% of the App Store. And, in the end, I’m thankful; not because I hate competition or freedom to release any kind of app that you want, but because most (I said most, not all) of these were useless or redundant in nature anyway. So, good riddance!
If you pay attention to the stream of new apps that launch on the App Store on a daily basis, which I do, then you already know that several times daily a long string of repetitive app titles comes along. These apps are often essentially galleries embedded in an app. Do we really need 4,000+ apps that are just galleries full of scantily clad women? Save the knee jerk response, because the answer is actually no. HTML is perfectly capable of performing the tasks that most of these apps did, and better yet, they don’t fill the App Store with junk.
But again, my opinion here doesn’t cover everything. Apple isn’t exactly consistent with what they bar from or permit in the App Store, and many apps were likely removed unnecessarily as a result of their recent change of mind, and that’s always unfortunate for legitimate developers.
I’d be interested to see if the nature of these “numerous complaints” were in the same spirit of my thankfulness for the reduction of useless clutter and junk from the App Store, or if these were actually complaints about adult content. I’m doubting Steve will ever allow the Adult iTunes Store, and for this I am thankful.
I may regret this, but I would like to hear what you think about this in the comments.
I agree that these apps are redundant and annoying, but I can see where there would be a market for such things. I think Apple could do well to offer the option to block these sorts of apps in parental controls; or, better yet, offer a long-overdue filtering system where one could block out certain unwanted categories. Aside from sexually explicit apps, this could be used to block out apps for which you would have no use, such as a navigation app if you've already got one or an instant messaging app if you're quite happy using IM+ or Meebo. I understand that Apple wants to keep their app store friendly to the greatest number of customers, but I think they are also cutting out a certain demographic in their market.