According to Salon.com’s Mary Elizabeth Williams, Apple recently (quietly) purged a buttload of sexy apps from iTunes. Apple’s top marketing man, Philip W. Schiller, filled The New York Times in on what prompted the deicison: “…women who found the content too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see.” The result was a terrible loss for humanity:
Arrivederci, Sexy Hangman. Sayonara, Strip Poker. Hasta la vista, Suicide Girls. In its zeal to ban booty, Apple even briefly 86′ed a benign bathing suit shopping app called Simply Beach.
Or was it really a loss? “T&A fans,” Williams writes, “don’t go down without a fight.” They sure didn’t — instead, realizing their beloved softcore content was disappearing, they made it a point to purchase what they still could:
… when a relatively tame, cleavage-based app called Tubes! somehow escaped the app-ocalypse, it saw its sales leap from a measly $30 a day to a frankly hilarious $10,000 in a single week. Stick it to the man, breast lovers.
The Playboy app is still available for purchase, Williams notes, and some apps have made a comeback, like Wobble, which “enables users to move a woman’s breasts without actually touching them.”
Apple gets 30% off all apps sold, and tw0-thirds of iPhone users are men. Is the company really willing to lose out on all this revenue? Apparently, yes, it’s willing to clean house because:
Women, for starters, are the biggest consumers of games. You want to alienate the Bejeweledcrowd? You do not. Furthermore, you want to alienate the consumers buying all those cute, distracting and incredibly lucrative apps for kids? Hell to the no.
There was an article about that in a German magazine last week. Apparently Apple focused on deleting apps from smaller unknown companies. Apps from Playboy are still there. Anyways, here’s the article: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,679976,00.html
Btw, yes, it’s in English :)
I love the suicide girls franchise! I am going to see if I can send them pictures or something when I look less like a baluga and more like a woman.
That makes two of us,I’m not crazy about tatts, but suicide girls are quite beautiful and erotic.
I love the girls, hate the company.
Apple can afford to lose the ladies. They can’t afford to lose the pervs so they’ll just turn a blind eye to third party apps and everyone gets a happy ending.
“everyone gets a happy ending.”
Except the ladies, I guess.
They have an app where you can move titties…how quaint.
I would probably play with that all day. Good thing I don’t have an iphone…
Psh. I would totally prefer a penis one. Or just a real dick to play with. Sometimes I feel like a 3-year-old boy who has just discovered how much fun his thing is :D
BEJEWELED ONLINE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH. Shame on you Zelda Lily I’m trying to finish University this year. Looks unlikely now. BEJEWELED ONLINE!