Apple Bans “Naughty” Apps

1984? Never heard of it!

In another twist of irony Apple has again proven that it’s more like ‘1984’ than it cares to admit. Before Apple would  just refuse apps for a silly reason like Tweetie. Now, however, they’ve decided to remove outright any app that is slightly racy. What’s odd is they don’t seem to have applied this new stance to all apps as just now I was able to search and find the Playboy app.

So yet again Apple is jumping headfirst into a situation without actually thinking it through. Not only that it’s another example of Apple exerting it’s totalitarian control over what you can and can’t have on its phone. What is equally as ironic as the Playboy app is that fact that, using Safari, you can browse as many adult based sites as you like so what’s the point in yanking all the adult apps? According to the Beeb’s report about this Phil Schiller put it down to complaints from women and parents alike about the nature of the applications that could be found on its App Store. However I feel that Apple’s approach is wholly mis-guided and while they should listen to complaints and act upon them, banning these apps outright wasn’t the way to go.

There are many different avenues they could’ve gone down. First and foremost as far as parents whose children own an iPhone some sort of parental control could have been added to the next version of the iPhone firmware. This would allow parents to control what their children can and can’t download as far as apps are concerned and as long as all apps are age rated appropriately there shouldn’t be much issue with that. Added to this you could even have a filter that hides any adult content so you’d never know it was even there. In respect to those apps deemed degrading by all means take it up with the developer but you shouldn’t tar everyone with the same brush. At the same time though just because some people think something is degrading to women there are others who disagree and I’m not talking about men either. This however is a long-standing argument that has been around probably as long as pornography has and that’s a long time. However this does feel like the app store is run by those too scared to accept diversity in its applications and are quick to respond with knee-jerk reactions.

I’m hoping that in the end Apple will realise that what they have done was not right and that they should adopt a different method. They have to accept the fact that a portion of their user base want these types of apps along with companies ready to develop for them. At the same time they know now that the current setup of the App Store is broken with respect to adult content and needs to be corrected. While you may or may not like this type of content it is unfair to remove it outright when there is clearly other, fairer ways, to deal with the situation.