Not sure if you have heard the news, but Apple has recently banned thousands of “bikini” applications from the App Store. The following standard email was sent out to numerous developers last week.
“The App Store continues to evolve, and as such, we are constantly refining our guidelines. [...] We have recently received numerous complaints from our customers about this type of content, and have changed our guidelines appropriately. We have decided to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store, which includes your application.”
The developer of iWobble, one of the banned applications that has been downloaded almost one million times from the App Store, spoke with Apple last week and received the following new rules:
- No images of women in bikinis (Ice skating tights are not OK either)
- No images of men in bikinis! (I didn’t ask about Ice Skating tights for men)
- No skin (he seriously said this) (I asked if a Burqa was OK, and the Apple guy got angry)
- No silhouettes that indicate that Wobble can be used for wobbling boobs (yes – I am serious, we have to remove the silhouette in this pic)

Not sure if you have heard about “iWobble”, but it is in my opinion a fairly harmless application which only contains one picture of a female – a silhouette image in the main menu. Now one might think that the App Store is completely void of all sexual nudity, but that is not true at all. Nude content from big publishers is still actively being approved by Apple, such as:
- GQ Magazine. Their February issue contains “Victoria’s secret hot model alert”
- Playboy. No comment on their content
Now someone please tell me the morale for keeping applications such as GQ Magazine and Playboy, while removing applications such as iWobble (which only contains a silhouette of a female)? The only reasons I can find for keeping those applications are (a) they come from major publishers, and (b) they generate huge amounts of revenue for Apple. In either case the App Store rules just became even more complex, especially if you are into the swimsuit business.