iPhone Bans Porn

Apple has deleted the best part of 5,000 applications for the iPhone due to their risque nature.

?

Last week Apple decided to purge some of the applications from its store due to their “overtly sexual nature”, although how Wobble iBoobs came under that category is hard to see. Ok, the name doesn’t help, but what the app does is allow you to add jiggle points to any picture you upload onto your iPhone – hardly pornographic, or even slightly risque.

It seems Apple might have installed the hysterical sister or son of Pat Robertson’s on its approval board. The Wobble iBoobs is just one of almost 5,000 applications slashed from the store’s inventory.

Overt pornography being banned is understandable, but a slight piece of flesh or some tongue-in-cheek app that is more aimed at the funny bone than any other part of the anatomy? Pah-leeze. And why now? Why approve these apps and then throw them out weeks or months after being initially approved? Apple claims it has received ‘numerous complaints’. Yeah, sure, course they have. Let’s bring out that old chestnut, with little or no evidence to back it up. Probably some over enthusiastic Apple lawyer trying to justify his or her retainer by stating what might happen if some people object to these applications.

But to add a little confusion to the mix, as of writing, the official Playboy application still remains for sale. Why? Who knows. According to Apple’s second in command Phil Schiller, “”Over the last few weeks a small number of developers had been submitting an increasing number of apps containing very objectionable content. It came to the point where we were getting customer complains from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see.We obviously care about developers, but in the end have to put the needs of the kids and parents first.”

Apple will be missing out on the revenue created by most of these apps, but that’s not the worrying aspect, which is two fold: In these times – especially Stateside – where the economy is still trying to recover, people need the revenue these apps generate to survive (iWobble has more than 970,000 downloads before being pulled); and nobody likes the “C” word – censorship – especially when it doesn’t seem to be warranted. And having changed the goal posts after the approval process is just not cricket.

Maybe sanity will break out and Apple with have a change of heart. Unlikely, but the howls of disapproval are growing.