Daring Fireball: Tits and Apps

http://daringfireball.net/2010/02/tits_and_apps

66 48 16 years ago

epochwolf• 16 years ago

Not exactly a great move on apple's part but I can understand why. I'd imagine quite a few parents would be upset to see adult content in the app store.

ugh2• 16 years ago

That’s what parental controls are for. Also: did you read the article?

ROFISH• 16 years ago

http://gizmodo.com/5480421/the-ipod-touch-is-this-generation...

Look at the numbers for the iPod Touch, almost two thirds of all iPod Touch owners are below 17. Given how many iPod Touches are out there, how many parents know about Parental Controls and how parents give little Johnny an iPod and never touch it after that and call Fox News when they find out about these "sexy apps"?

At least in with this branding idea, the parents might blame the app maker (SI, Playboy) instead of Apple because of the name recognition.

(That said, I'm all for removing this crap off the Top 25 lists.)

pyre• 16 years ago

There are quite a few parents that are upset that 'adult content' exists at all, but I wouldn't say that they have a right to try and impose those views on everyone else.

aresant• 16 years ago

start blah blah apple doesnt like their brand to be sullied by risque material blah blah blah apple's walled-garden approach is dangerous for developers blah blah end

Sorry, getting so bored with repetitive nature of all discussion around app store. Apple is walled garden, will do what they want, allowed to do what they want.

ugh2• 16 years ago

Not all walled gardens are created equal.

tdm9112• 16 years ago

I had wondered if Apple had removed them simply because the apps were of such low quality. This would explain why Playboy, Sport Illustrated etc are still present.

The cheap 'boobs/babes/bikini' apps constantly filled many slots in the top app lists, yet most seemed to be simply a collection of images and as such, their ratings were very, very low. They seemed to have no real content that wasn't freely available on the web.

Looking at the ones that were high in the top free app lists, they were simply 6-8 images of women in bikinis with ads attached.

elai• 16 years ago

It wasn't about app spam, or the ton's of other similar apps that happen to not be sexual wouldn't still be there.

jvdh2• 16 years ago

Did you even bother to read the linked article?

tdm9112• 16 years ago

Yes and then decided to give my take on it, much in the same way Gruber has given his take on it.

Neither of us know for sure why Apple did what they did.

megaduck4• 16 years ago

Every time I read one of these stories, I think of Nintendo in the 1980s and 90s. Back then, Nintendo was the undisputed king of video games with an install base of over 60 million NES consoles. They had a trusted brand, a massive library of titles, and money coming in hand-over-fist. They even managed to keep that success rolling, and the SNES was the top console through the early 90s.

Developers hated doing business with Nintendo. Nintendo put every game through a rigorous review process, and stripped out anything that they found objectionable. This castrated a lot of games like Mortal Kombat and Final Fight, and ensured that some titles never came to market at all.

Nintendo also charged a licensing fee, and ensured that only licensed games could be played. In order to distribute games, publishers had to buy the cartridges from Nintendo at pretty hefty prices.

This system worked great until Sony came along, and told publishers that they'd cut a better deal. Much more relaxed terms, and a far fewer restrictions on content. Suddenly, developers migrated en masse to the Playstation. Square became Sony-only. Capcom suddenly concentrated on Playstation games like Metal Gear Solid. All of a sudden, all the big new games were Playstation exclusives, and the only big games for N64 were Nintendo's own first-party titles. At the time, it felt like a switch had been flipped.

I feel a similar dynamic starting to play out with the App Store and Android. History seldom repeats itself, but it tends to rhyme.

potatolicious2• 16 years ago

There's another view to this, though.

Starting with the Wii Nintendo has significantly loosened their requirements for publishing games on their platforms. The Wii SDK is much cheaper (almost an order of magnitude) than either the Xbox or PS3 dev kits, the from what I can tell approval processes are far less onerous.

What has resulted? A deluge of crap. The amount of cheap shovelware games for the Wii boggles the mind, and dilutes the Wii brand significantly. It gets so bad that even non-gamer grandmas have noticed.

In comparison, Sony and MS are riding high, they have a gigantic amount of 3rd party support, people are willing to pay their ticket price for entry to the platform, and willing to put up with a lot more content restrictions (e.g., no free DLC, extensive multiplay/connectivity requirements even for singleplayer games)

There's a fine line to be walked here, and I'm not sure if Android has the model right either.

megaduck4• 16 years ago

True, there's a lot of crapware, but look at the sales results. Wii is the top console, by a large margin. Nintendo is absolutely beating the stuffing out of both MS and Sony on profits.

Look at the game sales charts on The Magic Box. NDS and Wii games dominate the top 20, and have been doing so for years. There's simply no comparison.

It's really hard to make the argument that Nintendo's screwing up here. If anything, facts seem to support the argument that loose licensing requirements leads to dominance.

martythemaniak2• 16 years ago

Sadly, I've seen no developer-centric push from Google. The SDK and tooling are excellent and the platform is very open, but the Android Marketplace itself is crap. The app descriptions and screenshots are paltry, there are no statics or metrics of any kind (other than total number of downloads and users), payment is not available in most countries, in-app purchases are nowhere on the roadmap and there isn't even a web-interface to the store!

For such an important piece of Android, the Marketplace is remarkably shitty.

donaq• 16 years ago

Well, for starters, they could allow developers to either get paid through channels other than Google Checkout or push Google Checkout merchant accounts to more countries. I was pretty enthusiastic about writing apps for Android until I realized that it was impossible for me to get paid for it.

barrkel• 16 years ago

On the other hand, there's precious little I've missed from the Apple store when installing apps on my Nexus One. The App Store has its own problems - in particular, I never did figure out how to easily rate an app except by deleting it.

The biggest annoyance for me WRT Andorid apps is the complete chaos in the SD card root directory. It's a free for all, with no naming conventions or directory structure whatsoever. I hide most of my files in a couple of folders like _music, _video etc. so they float to the top of the cruft when mounted - otherwise I'd be afraid they'd be clobbered by some app's random directory choice.

jsz0• 16 years ago

It really is. I'm still stuck on 1.5 so my experience may not be on-par with what the 2.x folks are seeing but about 30% of the apps I download from the Market just crash now. I'm super disappointed the latest update to Subsonic is totally unstable. It puts a little notification item up each time it crashes (please stop doing that, by the way) so I know it crashed 7 times today. I wouldn't have installed the new update if I knew this was going to happen. I don't see anyway of going back to the stable version I was using a few days ago that worked pretty well besides a bit of a clunky UI. That type of stuff frustrates me so much.

jamesbritt• 16 years ago

"For such an important piece of Android, the Marketplace is remarkably shitty."

True, but OTOH, you don't need it. You can locate apps reviewed and recommended on Web sites, and install using a qrcode.

I'd still like to see the marketplace improved. Given that there are few restrictions on what gets in there, having some better search and filtering tools would be a big win.

Maybe Google needs to buy a search company ...

glhaynes4• 16 years ago

I think this is a good and interesting analogy. I think it should be noted though that developers most likely came to Playstation not entirely because of the looser content restrictions (though that probably helped) but because of the superior, CD-ROM based hardware of the Playstation and its higher market share.

If Apple ever ends up without a device that doesn't support what's universally understood to be The Next Big Thing (Nintendo didn't like the disc format mostly because it was easy to pirate) while the Android vendors do have it, the analogy would be much more apt.

megaduck4• 16 years ago

That's a darned good point, but I think we might already be there.

First, a (very) slight correction. Piracy was a factor, but the N64 also didn't support CD-ROM because Nintendo was addicted to the control and revenue that the cartridge system gave them. The N64 cartridges had lockout chips preventing unlicensed software, similar to the NES carts. They even strengthened the system with a checksum calculated at boot.

I think Apple might be approaching a similar tipping point with things like Flash and Google Voice. These are obviously features that consumers want, but Apple is too addicted to their control over the platform.

jdietrich• 16 years ago

You're being a little too short-sighted. Nintendo came to dominance entirely because of their review process. They saw that Atari was killed off by the lack of consumer confidence that came from too many crappy games. The video games crash of 1983 was precipitated in large part by just three titles:

() Pac-Man 2600, considered by many to be the worst arcade conversion ever, sold 7 million units to unsuspecting customers who expected a faithful translation of the arcade game.

() E.T. was so hyped and so bad that several million copies were buried in the deserts of New Mexico.

() Custer's Revenge required the player to rape a native American woman.

Nintendo's Seal of Quality was in large part what revived the video games business, especially in the US. Parents who knew nothing about games could be assured that whatever they chose for their kids would be suitable and at least reasonably fun. Sony's ascendence could be just as readily explained by their use of CD-ROM media, the quality and innovation of their first-party titles and the phenomenal marketing effort that made PlayStation one of the coolest brands of the decade.

Personally, I think the success of the PlayStation is encapsulated in the masterful WipEout, the launch title that defined the console. Developed by the brilliant Psygnosis, the graphic design was handled from the start by The Designer's Republic, best known for their ultra-cool record covers for the Warp label. The music featured a careful selection of underground dance tracks. The game was so relentlessly cool that many European nightclubs begged Sony for demo systems for their chill-out rooms. In one fell stroke Sony divorced themselves from the child-friendly image of video games and in tandem with their brilliant advertising and promotion made video games seem almost dangerous and subversive. Genius.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Bqq38WZctA

megaduck4• 16 years ago

Well put, and beautifully written. No real disagreement.

However, I'd like to add that Nintendo's desire to control their licensing was one of the prime reasons that Nintendo never produced a CD-ROM based product. That left a gaping market void that Sony filled spectacularly.

This is a little bit of speculation, but I think if the N64 had a CD-ROM instead of carts, they would have kept Square and Capcom, and PSX would have been another Saturn.

rsheridan62• 16 years ago

I had E.T on the Atari 2600. I remember playing it for hours, unable to figure out how to progress in the game. I only found out 20 years later that it was literally unwinnable.

If that happened now, I would get on the internet and find out quickly. In fact, I would have looked at reviews of the game and never bought it in the first place.

So this kind of quality control is not nearly as beneficial now as it was in Nintendo's heyday.

Gmo• 16 years ago

Not to nitpick, but Metal Gear Solid is from Konami, not Capcom :)

Nonetheless, the analogy seems to be relatively adequate here.

jrockway3• 16 years ago

Maybe someday I will understand why sexual content "sullies" a brand's reputation. (Or rather why seeing 99% skin is fine and "family friendly", but as soon as the other 1% comes out, it's suddenly dirty. Also, if sex isn't "family friendly", where exactly did these families come from?)

Actually... I know I will probably never understand this.

statictype• 16 years ago

From what I understood, many of the banned apps did not contain explicit nudity - so they basically fall into the "99%" category. They still got banned because they too are presumably not considered family-friendly

jacoblyles2• 16 years ago

Just because social traditions are formed without conscious thought does not mean that they are without reason.

There is a large population that believes it is healthy to practice some restraint on the expression of human sexuality. They may not have a rational argument for believing so, but witnessing the dissolution of the family in the western world I wonder if traditional mores may be wiser than some of us think.

Some people with children desire to encourage them to have some reservation in their expression of sexuality, to resist the uninhibited style of our age. They hope to at least raise children that refrain from surfing porn with a handheld computer on a commuter train, fer chrissakes. And if Apple is willing to cater to their sensibilities, they will continue to earn their customers' money. It boils down to consumer preference and giving users what they want.

jrockway3• 16 years ago

It boils down to consumer preference and giving users what they want.

No, this is not what not allowing an app to be sold is. This is Apple's preference and not allowing users to get what they want.

Also, what's intrinsicialy wrong with someone looking at porn on the train? What makes it more wrong than, say, reading the Bible?

DanielBMarkham• 16 years ago

I've typed two(!) replies to this and deleted both, so here goes a third time.

Boobs beat bombs.

By that I mean that very, very, very rarely does a kid watch Terminator and go out and become some killing machine at the mall. But all the time kids watch porno and go out and get the neighbor's kid pregnant (or get pregnant themselves). So parents have a highly irrational fear of doing anything to increase the already high sex drive that kids have. Especially in ages without birth control, controlling procreation until there was a good chance at child survival was a critical part of maintaining the species. Even with birth control, STDs travel through younger populations at a much, much higher rate than older ones, usually due to passions overcoming practicality.

Boobs beat bombs.

jrockway3• 16 years ago

So parents have a highly irrational fear of doing anything to increase the already high sex drive that kids have.

But it's only Americans that feel this way.

And anyway, if "protecting the kids" is the problem, then Apple should just not let kids buy the swimsuit app or whatever. Why should adults suffer because "STDs travel through younger populations at a much, much higher rate than older ones"? That's borderline insane.

MikeMacMan2• 16 years ago

Does John Gruber have any demonstrable evidence to back up his opinions? No, they're rank speculation. They are, at best, educated guesses. I tire of this kind of blogging. I'm not saying that Mr. Gruber isn't informed, or intelligent, or perceptive. What I'm saying is that he's got nothing beyond that, and that's not good enough for me.

MikeCapone2• 16 years ago

Fair enough. Why do you still read his stuff, though?

MikeMacMan2• 16 years ago

By 'still read', you imply that i read his stuff on a regular basis. I don't read his stuff at all anymore, but who can't resist a title like that? :)

mkramlich• 16 years ago

A Tale of Two Cities, Les Miserables, To Kill a Mockingbird, Hamlet -- all full of opinion and rank speculation. At best, educated guesses. :P

telemachos• 16 years ago

I think your reductio would work better if you used non-fiction: The Republic, The Nicomachean Ethics, The Meditations on First Philosophy and Leviathan are full of opinion and rank speculation. At best, educated guesses.

(At least then, the parallel is on-target.)

Daring Fireball: Tits and Apps

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