Apple culls 6,000 sexy applications from App Store

by Stevie Smith - Feb 23 2010, 12:33

Reportedly acting in response to mounting customer complaints, gadget giant Apple Inc. has removed a large selection of suggestive iPhone applications from the virtual shelves of its hugely popular App Store.

In an interview with The New York Times, Apple’s head of worldwide product marketing, Philip W. Schiller, explained that a number of small developers had been submitting “an increasing number of apps containing very objectionable content” over recent weeks.

Schiller also said the App Store had received a number of complaints from women who found some of the content in question to be “degrading and objectionable,” while concerned parents had also lodged their displeasure with regard to easily obtainable pictures of semi naked models in skimpy bikinis.

While much of the App Store’s downloadable content ranges from casual puzzles and videogames through to productivity features and handy iPhone tools, it would appear now-dumped apps such as SlideHer, Sexy Scratch Off and Dirty Fingers were selling themselves on little more than blunt titillation.

For example, the Sexy Scratch Off application presents the user with a picture of a beautiful woman who can be instantly reduced to just her underwear by performing a swipe gesture across the screen of the iPhone (or iPod Touch) handset.

Similarly, Dirty Fingers shows a bikini-clad beauty armed with a spray gun and cloth, before she then proceeds to clear the display screen of overlaid fingerprints from the inside.

According to application tracker AppShopper.com, Apple’s purge of potentially contentious content has seen the Cupertino-based company dropping some 6,000 software apps from its download store in the space of just four days.

“At the end of the day, Apple has a brand to maintain,” commented Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster in the NYT report. “And the bottom line is they want that image to be squeaky clean.”

It is interesting to note that Apple’s sudden cull through a mass of applications showing women in bikinis and lingerie has not affected the App Store positioning of sexy applications offered by both Playboy and the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated.

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