Apple's sex ban made official

Apple's ban on the Wobble iBoob app has been extended to cover more than 5000 others which the company claims contain "objectionable content" - objectionable content that was deemed fine for months beforehand.

Apple says that it has responded to complaints from users, with Philip Schiller, Apple's product marketing boss, telling the New York Times that recently a number of developers had submitted "an increasing number of apps containing very objectionable content". It's not clear exactly what that content was, and the App Store already contains an age rating system.

"It came to the point where we were getting customer 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", Schiller added.

Developers are predictably miffed. "It’s very hard to go from making a good living to zero", said  Fred Clarke who makes an app called Sexy Scratch Off. "This goes farther than sexy content. For developers, how do you know you aren’t going to invest thousands into a business only to find out one day you’ve been cut off?". He added that he was now investigating rival platforms.

Those rival platforms include Google's Android ecosystem - which also looks down on adult content, but takes a much lighter approach to enforcement. An identical app to Wobble iBoobs called AndWobble is available on the Android Market at the time of writing. BlackBerry has also investigated an age ratings system, whilst Symbian and Windows Mobile have no restrictions.

Have you lost your favourite app in the great iPorn purge of 2010? Or is this the right approach for a company that's selling its products to an increasingly family-oriented audience? Let us know what you think in the comments.

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