Apple’s head of marketing comments on App Store smut purge.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 06:19 AM | Posted by howard
Apple’s head of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller spoke with the New York Times this week about his company’s recent policy shift regarding sexually suggestive software in the App Store.
During the past several days, over 5,000 applications were deleted from the App Store, or about 3% of the store’s offerings, reportedly because they contained “sexually explicit” content.
“It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints 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,” says Phil Schiller.
When questioned about an app from Sports Illustrated containing similar sexual motifs, which as of Monday was still available at the App Store, Schiller responded;
“The difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format.”
“It’s very hard to go from making a good living to zero,” says Fred Clarke, whose company On the Go Girls had all of its 50 applications deleted from the App Store as of Monday.
“This goes farther than sexy content. For developers, how do you know you aren’t going to invest thousands into a business only to find out one day you’ve been cut off?”
“We obviously care about developers,” Mr. Schiller tells the Times. “But in the end have to put the needs of the kids and parents first.”
Reader Comments
“But in the end have to put the needs of the kids and parents first.”
Dear God! Won’t somebody think of the children!?
Schiller is dancing like a maniac on this one, invoking the need to protect “the children.”
Obvious question: Rather than banning them, why don’t they just adjust the rating? After all, if it’s a question of the kiddies getting smut on their iPhone through the App Store, rate them all mature. There. No more kiddies getting into the smut.
And the answer about why Playboy and FHM’s content is still there can be paraphrased as, “We don’t want to piss off established companies because they might sue us but we can fuck with the small-fry all we want.”
The scariest thing about this is that Apple has shown that they can decide that a bunch of Apps must go. So what happens to all the book apps in the App Store when iBooks comes out. Will Apple suddenly decide to remove titles that conflict with ones in their bookstore? How many developers get screwed at that point?
Helen Lovejoy. Love it.