Repent, ye sinners for—wait, what? This just in: those fearing the imminent collapse of all that is pure and good about the App Store can relax and go back to fearing the imminent collapse of our economic system. The scourge of pornography has been wiped from the App Store.
iPhone application Hottest Girls recently added pornographic content to its application in the form of photos of nude and topless women. The application had disappeared from the store by Thursday, although at the time developer Allan Leung claimed it was at his behest, since his servers, which provide the images, were being overloaded by the demand.
Nice try, developer guy. As it turns out, Apple had in fact pulled the application. As for how it made it on the store in the first place, the company says Leung snuck in the racy pictures after the application had been approved. Apple spokesperson Tom Neumayr told Macworld:
Apple will not distribute applications that contain inappropriate content. The developer of this application added inappropriate content directly from their server after the application had been approved and distributed, and after the developer had subsequently been asked to remove some offensive content. This was a direct violation of the terms of the iPhone Developer Program. The application is no longer available on the App Store.
So, Apple won’t distribute apps with pornographic content. That gibes with my earlier assessment that the company values its carefully-crafted image far more than it does the potential revenue. After all, Wal-Mart, Target, and Best Buy could make plenty of money selling porn, but you don’t see it on their shelves, do you?
Meanwhile, all of Leung’s apps seem to have been removed from the App Store, including Hottest Girls companion app Hottest Guys; EliteBrowser, a full-screen Web browser; and Send Flowers, a wallpaper image app. However, other similar non-pornographic apps are apparently still fair game.
Such is the wrath of Apple: swift, sure, and uncompromising.