If you’ve been following apple related news you’ve heard that they recently started coming really hard after any applications that could be considered “sexy” or “suggestive” — whether its by virtue of having girls in bikinis in their screenshots, or suggestive text in the description — and removing them from the app store. You can read about it in more detail on this techcrunch and ars technica posts.
I’m not going to argue about fairness to developers who have invested time and money into, in many cases, perfectly legitimate apps, only to see them pulled down without any warning despite being approved in the first place. I’m not going to discuss the fact that there seems to be no clear guidelines or rules as to what constitutes an “offending” app, meaning that these can change at any moment to accommodate apple’s every whim. I’m not even going to mention that not a few months ago apple introduced the 17+ rating which is used to prevent the purchase of “adult” apps by kids, and which could be easily used to also filter out those apps from even showing up on the store pages unless age was verified. (Why Apple would not do that in the first place is beyond me, you’d think they have amateurs working there.)
I simply want to point out that a company (and more importantly, the man in charge of that company) that once prided itself on standing up to “the man” (Microsoft), is now doing things that are far worse than what “the man” ever did. Can you imagine for a second what would happen if MS started blocking software and applications from Windows because they were “from competitor”, or had “titillating images”, or “duplicated existing functionality”? Why, why are there people defending Apple?!?! The entire European Union got up in arms because MS bundled IE with Windows, yet we are allowing Apple absolute control over a product that WE bought and supposedly own. The iPhone (and in the future probably the iPad) is fast becoming the second “PC” for many. With one little difference of course — when you buy a PC desktop or laptop (even one with Mac OS) on it, you’re in control. You decide what software to install, and how to use it. With the iPhone you don’t — you can only do what Apple deems appropriate. I don’t know about you, but that scares me.
So what’s next? Will Apple be blocking Stanza and Classics when iPad comes out because they duplicate functionality of Apple’s bookstore? Will it pull down Evernote from the app store if it decides to extend the native note app to use the cloud. And what about Safari? Can’t help but bring up the fact that MS was forced to include a browser ballot screen and the European copy of windows (while never actually blocking anyone from installing other browsers), yet Apple gets away with not allowing any “browser” applications in the app store.
Of course the worst part of it all is that they get away with all of that — so many people have been blinded by the shiny iphone that as far as the average user is concerned it’s all perfectly fine. Only the bloggers and the techies actually speak out against this, and even then the opinions are split 50/50. All I can say is Double U. Tee. Eff!
