Apple removing “sexy” apps from app store, what’s next?

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.) Keep Reading

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