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.) Read more »