Apple Has a New Porn Problem

adeelarshad82 writes "Twitter's new iOS-only app, Vine, was prominently featured by Apple as an 'Editor's Pick' in its App Store the day it launched. However, given Apple's policies for adult content, they may have rushed the whole thing since this past Sunday, a number of news outlets ran stories covering the rise of easily-accessible pornography on the new video sharing app. As Joshua Topolsky explains, the situation draws even more attention to the vague and sometimes confusing rules of Apple's App Store guidelines, and more clearly showcases the sporadic and often unusual criteria the iPhone-maker uses to decide the fates of applications. So it will be interesting to see how Apple handles this given that they've never been shy about banning similarly racy apps in the past."

Comments

It's Not A Problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a feature!

Lock in and Consumerism

[webmistressrachel]

Apple loves Twitter. It's 140-char limit and mentality (following celebrity and names rather than participating or creating) really encourages the kind of consumer thinking Apple depends on. I predict that they won't ban, they'll put pressure on Vine to remove adult content.

Old

[RedHackTea]

Twitter messages already introduced pr0n. 3===D ~~~~ ( @ Y @ )

It appears that Twitter has a problem

[MCSEBear]

Twitter has begun to censor porn related searches on Vine.

Twitter's video-sharing app now blocks many searches for pornographic terms. Trying to search for the #porn hashtag (and other terms such as #sex, #boobs, and #booty) brings up no results at this time.

Porn is not a problem

[erroneus]

It is people who think porn is a problem which is the problem.

What were you expecting, kittens ?

[kegon]

I love this report about the article:

One user, Taylor Winkelmeyer, wrote: "I clicked on the link because I thought the warning was a joke. "I am furious I had to see something like this. Someone please tell me how to get it off my feed."

It's got to be fake, right ?

Re:It is a problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple hasn't figured out how to get people to sign up for porn using their (known to spouse) iTunes accounts, which means they can't get their 30%. That's their porn problem.

Apple did, however, figure out that banning porn apps is an easy way to score brownie-points with parents associations and christian conservative morality campaigners without pissing off their porn consuming customers who access porn via a web browser in privacy mode anyway and remain completely unaffected by the ban... and Apple can't tax porn downloaded via Safari now can it. Also most people don't want want to advertise the fact that they are porn consumers by having a porn app on their phone so banning porn apps probably isn't hurting Apple's bottom line all that much. This ban on porn apps is a complete joke, but it helps to sell their iDevices and anybody who still fears that their kids might download porn on their phone can ask their telco to put a content filter on their kids' mobile account while resting easy in the knowledge they can't bypass that barrier by downloading a porn app. Meanwhile vendors of encryption protected file storage apps are making brisk business (no prizes for guessing what drives a lot of those sales) and Apple is levying a 30% cut on ever one of them. So Apple has found a way to appease the conservatives while still finding a way to profit off of people's need to hide browser downloaded porn... genius.