If you thought Steve Jobs went to all the trouble of inventing the iPhone just so you could watch bikini babes bounce around your screen, it's time to think different.
The computer company has something of a boob problem on its hands. Over the last couple of months, Apple has started banishing crass applications from its popular App Store, where people download software for their iPhones and iPods. More than 5,000 have been axed. The departed - many of which featured ladies wearing nothing but hosiery and brassieres - do not seem to have been particularly lewd; "trashy" might be a better word. All the same, they fell afoul of Apple's newfound mores, and they will no longer be seen on your iPhone, or anyone else's, for that matter.
The issue has caused a brouhaha, and not because the Hooters patrons of the world have risen up in anger. It's shone an uncomfortable spotlight on the complete and arbitrary control Apple holds over the devices that so many of us pay so much for.
Apple has always been in the control-freak business, but this unfortunate tendency has been in overdrive since the iPhone came out. Short of hacking your iPhone, the only way to get applications on and off the device is to download them from Apple's App Store. There are more than 140,000 apps to choose from there; incredibly enough, every single one of them has been individually approved by Apple. And that which Apple approves, Apple can un-approve.
The boob problem has been growing since early in the year, when bawdy application developers started complaining that Apple was deleting their work from their store. Last week, one of Steve Jobs' right-hand men came forward, telling the New York Times that the company was responding to "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."
One banned app let users swipe their finger across a picture of a young lady to reveal a picture of her in her undergarments. Another would make a tiny, bikini-clad young woman wipe down the screen as the user touched it. Yet another would, rather ingeniously, take a regular photo and let the user specify which strategic areas should be made to jiggle.
Nobody's going to mistake these items for progress (though apparently more than a few people mistook them for being worth paying for). But the contents of these apps are nothing compared to the significantly low standards of the open Internet, which can be spelunked just by opening the iPhone's web browser.
In fact, the whole app-screening enterprise has been riddled with inconsistencies. Other, high-profile pieces of titillation-ware got a pass. You can still purchase the Playboy application, bunnies and all. The Victoria's Secret application is still there. I just saw an app version of the Kama Sutra there, though I imagine it would only be more engaging if the illustrations jiggled.
This is a lurid spin on a problem that's been around as long as the App Store itself: Developers can pour hundreds of hours into programming an iPhone app, only to find that Apple doesn't like it, so nobody can use it. What's more, Apple has a history of blocking apps that might threaten its business, like alternative Web browsers, e-mail programs, and products from direct competitors. Last year, Apple blocked a phone app from Google, leading to a protracted falling-out between the two companies. (Google later re-launched the product as a souped-up Web page. In fact, delivering software over the Web is one of the only ways to circumvent Apple's choke-hold.)
From Apple's side, the logic goes that the more parts of the ecosystem they can control, the more quality they can assure. Keeping junk off the iPhone and out of the App Store ensures a smoother user experience.
It's quite understandable that they'd want to keep their store from being overrun by the kind of junk that crufts up the shelves of shopping-mall novelty stores. (Can I interest you in a wind-up dancing penis?) The problem is that Apple's store is the only store for iPhone, iPod - and soon, iPad - software. Apple can afford to be arbitrary, and nobody can do much about it except complain. In fact, hacking your iPhone to circumvent Apple's restrictions isn't just difficult, but under stringent US copyright law, it might well be illegal.
And how have consumers responded? By buying tens of millions of iPods and iPhones. Open alternatives, championed by Google and its Android operating system, are providing real competition, but on the whole these concerns haven't resonated with the general public.
One day, they might. Mobile computing - phone, pod or pad - is the future. And the software on the world's best and most important mobile computers is being throttled by a company that, we've learned, lets in the apps it likes, and blocks the ones it doesn't. Eventually, there will be more at stake than just boobs.