On Friday’s episode of The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien, one of Conan’s jokes was about the the Hottest Girls application for the iPhone, which was pulled after an update added nudity to the application, thus being the first widely known pornographic program in the App Store. The joke itself was sort of take-it-or-leave-it humor, but Conan talked about how Apple released porn. As we know, Apple doesn’t make anything in the App Store, but it does approve the content that goes in. And with that comes a problem.
For American companies, porn is a big no-no, so people sort of flip when a company that is considered “wholesome” releases content with nudity. The important part here is not the morals or anything like that, but that the closed nature of the iPhone as a platform makes it so that people see Apple as the purveyors of iPhone programs. Anyone who follows tech knows that what happened was that the creators of Hottest Girls decided to funnel porn into it, so Apple made it so people couldn’t buy it anymore. But the media picked this up as “Apple pedals porn, stops doing so.”
This is going to be a problem on any closed platform consistently for two reasons. The lesser is that having to approve programs all the time will inevitably lead to some carelessness in the review process, or contrarily overly strict policies, both of which are damaging. The bigger reason is that programs can get on the internet, so creators can funnel whatever they want into them. Apple isn’t going to reject every program that can get online, which means all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.
While perception will take a while to change, opening the iPhone would be a solution as it would provide a way for people to get programs onto the iPhone without having to go through an Apple-controlled portal. No one would care about pornography in that instance, as people would be putting out porn programs left and right. But more importantly, Apple could give up the role as babysitter and move on to bigger and better things.
