Apple iPhone

Widespread anger and concern over censorship have followed a decision by Apple to ban some adult-themed applications from its iPhone.
Thousands of apps with adult-themed content were removed from the store in a concerted drive late in February although some, such as one from Playboy, remain.
Apple has said that certain apps were removed following customer complaints. “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,” Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of worldwide product marketing, told the New York Times.
But developer Jon Atherton is angry that previously-approved apps have been pulled, and told the BBC he believed Apple was “experimenting with our livelihoods”.
ChilliFresh is an Australian company that creates apps for the iPhone, including the recently banned Wobble, which allows users to add ‘wobble’ functionality to pictures of women’s breasts.
“I’m now worried the eco-system is run by puritans and is not fair to all players,” Jon Atherton said on the ChilliFresh website.
“And worst of all it is not a secure source of income. It can drop to close to zero if they decide to change the rules,” he added.
The firm was making £320 a day out of its apps, a figure which has dropped to £5 since the ban, he said.
“On Friday evening we got an email out of the blue which basically said, thanks very much but we don’t want you any more. Apple said it was removing all overtly sexual apps,” he said.
He said that if Apple was serious about protecting young customers it should allow parents to set controls for devices.
He called on Apple to publish its new guidelines so that developers knew where they stood, and to clarify why not all sex-related apps were affected by the ban.
“What makes it worse is that a lot of people now think that the store is a safe place for their kids to go to without supervision – it just isn’t because Apple have applied their guidelines unevenly”, he said.
The New York Times believes that Apple has carried out this purge so that it does not scare off potential customers for the iPad tablet computer.
“Apple has a brand to maintain,” Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray who keeps a close eye on the company, told the paper. “And the bottom line is they want that image to be squeaky clean.”