IKamasutra: Apple Hates Brunettes

by varl • 14 years ago

355 158 14 years ago

rev087• 14 years ago

The app looks extremely well made, really a shame it has been pulled out of the stores.

epaga• 14 years ago

It IS well made. My wife and I got it about a year ago. It's password-protected and very tastefully drawn. About 25% of the positions are virtually impossible but pretty hilarious. :)

I'd have had no issue with Apple if they had simply not allowed it on day 1. But to allow it to be hugely successful for such a long period of time (as in: within the top 50 or so overall for months on end) only to pull it without reason is horrifying to me as an app developer.

kodisha4• 14 years ago

Nice job Apple and Google, nice job.

If I were in charge, person who made the call would be out of job.

And if this was "company" decision, well, good luck to you all, and move to Europe. We love brunettes here.

ovi256• 14 years ago

Apple has consistently proven that they want the App Store to be squeaky Disney family clean. So the fact that some apps went through the cracks was pure luck.

kodisha4• 14 years ago

But why? WHY? What harm could come from app like this?

Please, assume that I'm 12 years old, and try to explain.

nlc• 14 years ago

Considering the app has been in the top paid apps charts for years, it probably wasn't a crack that let it in.

antirez• 14 years ago

The problem is that "app approval" does not scale well, for a very simple reason: it is hard. Applying guidelines like the ones Apple uses, requires a very skilled individual that is able to evaluate at the same time a set of rules in a flexible way, and really understand if the app is good for the apple store or not. You can do that if you have a team of 20. Finding 300 people doing this work very well is going to be very hard, and you need to pay more as this must be people that at the same time understand design, programming (if you read the rules thare are many that without understanding of software are hard to apply), and at the same time able to find a good balance between flexibility and severity. Not an easy task at all.

Maybe they could improve the process with the following schema:

* Instead of doing a single longer review, a few of your approval team will review the app briefly, and provide a score between 1 and 5 of "acceptability".

* If the score is 4 or 5, go forward. If the score is <= 3 send it to a more expert reviewer that will do an in depth analysis.

Optionally also discard the app if the average score is <= 1.5 if there are problems with the "load" of the experts.

plasma• 14 years ago

I don't agree that its a super hard job and that's why this problem has occurred.

Surely the review team should hear the iKamasutra's concerns and realise that the app has been in use for years already, and that the sudden reason to reject it is confusing and obtuse.

ErrantX3• 14 years ago

What you are saying boils down to "Surely it's obvious that...".

Of course, the problem there is that it's not obvious to a non-trivial number of people. Who apparently in this case work in Apple's review department.

The most obviously idiotic things often look perfectly sensible from "inside", or from a singular perspective.

illumin8• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, it sounds like it might be time for the iKamasutra team to have a lawyer write a letter to Apple. It seems like they have a pretty clear cut case of unfair treatment towards their app. Sometimes, a letter from a lawyer is all it takes to get things moving in the right direction.

bambax• 14 years ago

In this case the crux of the problem is that they're deleting an app that's almost as old as the app store itself.

Curating content is almost impossible to do; app stores should limit their reviews to exclude:

- viruses

- blatant spam and copyright violations

and THAT'S IT. Assessing the quality of an app is what users' ratings are for (and of course excluding adult content is just childish).

excuse-me3• 14 years ago

App stores should do what is good for their shareholders

Apple is trying to move from being the cool kids counter-culture creative types alternative to the PC to being the corporate acceptable alternative to the Blackberry.

A story about karmasutra apps or ifart in the WSJ could cause a CEO to change their mind about allowing users to use their iPhone on the corp network.

And of course the best way of preventing such a story is, as we all know, to make a big splash about banning such an app

treelovinhippie• 14 years ago

Yes exactly! Could you imagine how far behind the Internet (and society) would be if any website you wanted to launch had to first be reviewed and assessed by Apple/Google/<insert other corporate entity>!

This system of app review and locked-down pay-wall systems makes commercial sense for now, but ultimately it is not scalable, doesn't provide quality and is too slow. Any system that goes against the grain of a major trend, progressing along a rapid trajectory, with rapid innovation... simply will not continue.

The point at which people realize that Google and Apple are hindering innovation, will be the point at which they will open-up, and hopefully become a free platform.

(although I'm hoping before that time, our Internet infrastructure and bandwidth will be ubiquitous enough that all phones will simply boot into a browser - it's inevitable at some near point in the future).

ErrantX3• 14 years ago

> Assessing the quality of an app is what users' ratings are for

As an app store user I disagree. User ratings in the app store are not really a useful guideline in my experience - and it often takes trying several (reasonably well rated) apps to find one that is actually usable.

For example; it took me the best part of 10 tries to find a working tourist map of a city I was visiting a few weeks ago.

The app store review process is currently broken; as you say this decision is prudish, and other review decisions are idiotic.

But I think it is generally broken too in letting too much cruft go live.

In fact, I'd happily pay a premium for a "curated" store where reviewers judged the utility of apps more strictly.

timwiseman• 14 years ago

I agree with you, which is why I use Android. But, I see an appeal to the walled garden.

I can let my children get on the app store without worrying too much it will lead to questions I don't feel like answering at that age. I have greater confidence that getting a game for the kids won't come with overly onerous spyware. I also have a better feeling that it will generally work.

This is not the way I want to operate, but I see how it appeals to some people.

triblib2• 14 years ago

i've always wondered how the app approval process works...I imagine there are diagnostic tools that search for suspicious behavior in the code. But how much time is spent going through the content? clearly there's not a rigorous effort to test stability. Besides crashes, I've seen games where much of the UI is just broken through bugs.

But seeing how quick they are to jump on objectionable content...is it safe tos ay that most of an app-approver's time has to be spent skimming for nudity/extreme violence/cuss words? how else could this reasonably scale?

brudgers• 14 years ago

>"The problem is that "app approval" does not scale well,"

Orwell's description of how censorship looks at scale is probably as good as any.

JohnnyFlash• 14 years ago

The trouble is that the guidelines aren't black and white. They are somewhat grey. This means that 2 reviews will rarely result in the same action.

I would argue the Kama Sutra is both historical and educational and not sexually explicit at all. Perhaps a celebration of human bodies even, I don't know.

It seems though that Apple particularly feel that its customers require a squeaky clean filter to assess everything they access.

For cloned and low quality app's this is great! Restricting porn... I guess it is a good thing. Kid's can browse the app store. However this grey area between what is clean and what isn't is something they have never mastered.

It is really sad to see Google following this path of over-censorship..

ErrantX3• 14 years ago

I've always thought the keyword is "explicit" for which the most relevant definition is probably: "described or shown in realistic detail"

I had the iKarmasutra app and it was great; slightly coy and fun, but detailed enough to understand how each position worked. The images were tastefully drawn with the same emphasis. But the detail couldn't be described as "realistic"

I don't think you even need to argue the historical/educational angle.

rmc4• 14 years ago

I would argue the Kama Sutra is both historical and educational and not sexually explicit at all. Perhaps a celebration of human bodies even, I don't know.

The problem is that there is no one objective definition of seuxality explicit. "I'll know it when I see it" is almost as good as you can get.

rogerbraun• 14 years ago

I think a guide to sex positions is as sexually explicit as it can get, it's just not necessarily pornographic.

I also think that the argument that it keeps the store clean so kids can browse it does not really work. Other online stores like Amazon don't have this, you can search for and buy porn there and nobody is outraged. A much better idea would be to give apps a suggested user age, so you could filter the store.

huggyface3• 14 years ago

I would argue the Kama Sutra is both historical and educational and not sexually explicit at all.

What does "sexual explicit" mean? It is quite explicit about sex -- it is wholly concerned with sex.

However the app in question is not the historic Kama Sutra. It is a list of sexual positions, and by their own admission, with some subtle between the lines commentary, they seemed to be pushing boundaries on what graphically was allowed.

rbarooah9• 14 years ago

The fact that this happened on both the App store, and Google Play almost simultaneously raises the suspicion that one of the less reputable competitors lodged some kind of complaint.

datagramm2• 14 years ago

Very possibly. It could also be that someone at Google is watching what gets taken down from the app store an following suit.

megablast• 14 years ago

Why would they ever do that?

netcan2• 14 years ago

disreputable sex educators?

scythe2• 14 years ago

I'm bored, so let's run the numbers: the elapsed time between removal from the App Store and removal from Google Play is 23 days, at a point where it had been simultaneously in the App Store and the Android Market for ~450 days (I don't know the exact number), which gives us P = 23 / 450 = 0.05 -- where the null hypothesis is that removal happens at random -- for this within 23 days of each other, and that's on the edge of statistical significance (you usually set alpha = 0.05). So maybe something weird happened.

gcheong7• 14 years ago

Maybe Playboy decided they wanted to publish a Kamasutra app?

hef19898• 14 years ago

Are we all going nuts nowadays? Really, to remove a product from your store (which also happens to be a monopolistic sales channel) after it was there for years and recieved several updates since without any dialog with the producer of the product is bad style, really bad style.

Especially if the producer is willing to change the product to fit your requirements.

Some time ago almost everyone agreed that Nokia failed also due to a lack of developers for Simbia, do you really think treating developers with a proven track record like that will do you any good?

I really hope that this issue is solved to the satisfaction of every party involved and the app will be back soon.

Ah, and finally, if this was due to the "sexual content" the only thing left to say is "brave new world". And that from a company that help to battle SOPA...

blindhippo2• 14 years ago

Sadly, developers are stuck with Apple being our app approval overlord - and Apple knows it.

There really isn't any competition in the app "market" because Apple is far too big to really allow for it. Any and all of these smart phone platforms need to be legislated to provide opportunity for different store fronts beyond the platform provider.

Apple really is the 21st century Microsoft.

petercooper• 14 years ago

Yep, and in Mountain Lion, it's coming to the desktop too.. I wouldn't be surprised if Safari can only load approved sites by default in 10.9 at this rate.

waqf• 14 years ago

The problem "nowadays" (meaning, with business models like Apple's or Google's) is that common sense is an expensive commodity compared to the opportunity cost of making one arbitrary decision or another on an individual app.

And the legal system just hasn't yet caught up enough to keep them in check. They're the robber barons of our age.

spinchange• 14 years ago

Sergey said that Apple and Facebook are a threat to freedom on the web, but I submit that commercial 'app stores' like Google Play and Apple's AppStore are the real threat. They have all the control and solely get to decide what is acceptable or not (while reserving the right to change their mind later). Google Play won't even let you rent a video from the store if it detects your phone has been rooted. This sucks. We've gained all this freedom and control with free software and the web, etc, and now we're going to give it all away to these stupid commercial app stores.

klez• 14 years ago

For Apple this is a problem since the app store is the only source of software for non-jailbroken iphones.

Regarding Android, we can always use another marketplace, but then the problem would be security and good quality apps. And so we would again be at square one. Does anybody have another idea?

AndrewDucker• 14 years ago

I disagree regarding Google Play.

Appstore is a threat because if you want software on your Apple phone then it is the only legal method.

But with Android you can install software from any app store you like, or directly. Google provide an app store as a service, but it's only one of many.

rmc4• 14 years ago

Yes the fact that you can add extra apps is better than the 'our way or the highway' approach of the apple app store, but defaults matter. 99% of people think the play store/app store/android market is the only way to do it. You remove it from there, it's gone.

michh2• 14 years ago

Until your carrier decides you don't need the ability to install non-market apps and disables the option. Oh, and the phone in question is not yet rooted. This is a matter of time if it isn't already happening. Google can do the open and free dance all it wants but with the carriers standing between you and Google...

bluetshirt• 14 years ago

Jailbreaking your iPhone is NOT illegal.

ken• 14 years ago

The App Store is the only out-of-the-box method to get natively-compiled code on your phone, but the things that web apps on iOS can't do seems to be shrinking all the time.

Javascript web apps on iOS can have home-screen icons, and "loading" splash screens, and persist data to a local database, and even support multitouch and the accelerometer, all offline.

A lot of the iOS apps I use could have been written as web apps. Is this true on Android, too? Maybe it's time for somebody to write a "generic mobile app store", for the apps that don't require fancy things like 3D graphics.

datagramm2• 14 years ago

A friend of mine that used to work at iTunes tells me that Apple always keep the front page of their stores completely 'family friendly'. Maybe this mentality is starting to filter down past the front page and result in a knee-jerk rejection of anything vaguely adult.

StCroix2• 14 years ago

I hope that Steve Jobs, who happily credited himself as an openly adherent member and ambassador of the counterculture that fought for ideas like this to be acceptable in a then over-conservative society, is rightfully turning in his grave.

mrich• 14 years ago

Let's not act like he would have cared about this while he was alive. Apple's products and services always place family-friendlyness over any kind of free expression.

chris_wot6• 14 years ago

Steve Jobs was quoted as saying "those who want porn can get an Android". I'm very much afraid you are wrong on this one.

kalleboo• 14 years ago

Steve Jobs wanted to offer people "Freedom from Porn". Seems he was pretty conservative in his older days (I got this impression from his biography as well, but I can't back that up). http://gawker.com/5539717/steve-jobs-offers-world-freedom-fr...

nextparadigms• 14 years ago

Apple's app rejection policy seems as unpredictable as Google's account banning.

rkudeshi• 14 years ago

I'm not a fan of these sort of apps but from the pics provided, it seems to be made as tastefully as possible and without excessive "sexual allure" (ie. titillating apps made for 13-year-olds to download without their parents knowing).

(I'd say the 13 million "SALES" are also an indicator of quality but, Angry Birds aside, there's no way a number that high was all paid downloads.)

xyzzyz• 14 years ago

Imagine all the titillating books 13-year-olds can read in a public library without their parents knowing!

Seriously, though, there are much better sources of porn out there than books and sketchy non-explicit monochrome drawings, and kids are well aware of them.

blahedo2• 14 years ago

> "(I'd say the 13 million "SALES" are also an indicator of quality but, Angry Birds aside, there's no way a number that high was all paid downloads.)"

Are you sure? Why?

sp332• 14 years ago

If that number isn't just iPhone sales, then it includes the free versions for Android, Chrome, Roku, etc.

JohnLBevan• 14 years ago

Someone could start an App Approval business. Applications don't require approval to go on to an app store / market place, but if the developers submitted their code to one AppApproversLtd, those guys could review it for a small comission, then upload it to the app store as a trusted application. Though there's a slight conflict of interest (i.e. the person paying the approvers is also the person sending the code) I believe it's in the AppApproversLtd company's interest to do a good job since their business depends on them giving a reliable evaluation / building up a good reputation.

Using that business model keeps flexibility in place, where users decide if they want to risk trusting an unapproved app, or would rather go for an app that's been approved by one of these companies (potentially incurring additional cost if the developers passed the approval cost on to their users rather than offsetting against advertising).

AppApproversLtd could offer different levels of approval / ratings - i.e. just checking for malicious code vs. checking for polite error handling, efficiently written code, best practices, impact on battery life, etc.

shadesandcolour• 14 years ago

That would be fine but it doesn't solve any of the problems really. Apple will still have control over their store. Google Play will continue to let you in and then review if they get a complaint (at least I assume that's how they do it). Ultimately I'm not sure that the business model will work. It only really applies to Android and even then most people get apps through the marketplace. Those people who want to side load apps most likely know the consequences or know someone who does and decide whether or not to take the risk.

It seems analogous to running your website code through the W3 checker. It's a certification that you did stuff right, but it doesn't stop most users from going to your site if you don't have that little badge at the bottom.

kodisha4• 14 years ago

Is it possible that Ikamasutra developer sue Apple and win in court?

mistercow• 14 years ago

I think that really depends on what you mean by "possible". For all practical purposes, it's pretty unlikely given the comparative legal resources of the two companies.

wpietri• 14 years ago

Exactly. In a lot of things in the US, you get as much justice as you can afford.

alastairpat2• 14 years ago

Unless the title of the blog post has been changed since submission to HN, why the editorialised title?

Edit: I've since learnt that that is actually the title of the post. It still seems kind of sensationalist none-the-less.

_delirium• 14 years ago

The title of both the HN submission and the blog post are "Apple Hates Brunettes" at the moment, unless I'm getting some kind of cached copy?

alastairpat2• 14 years ago

Oh, my mistake - that is actually the title. Thanks.

blindhippo2• 14 years ago

Well, their product has been unjustly removed from both Google and Apple stores. I'm surprised the blog post isn't filled with more negativity towards both companies - the "sensationalist" title suits the content and tone perfectly.

ForrestN• 14 years ago

Perhaps there should be an 18+ section that can be blocked by parents with a password? If you have an out-of-the-box iPhone you can get any manner of porn within Safari. Why shouldn't you be able to get real porn with a better experience via an app?

netcan2• 14 years ago

slightly off topic.

Today I realized that my 3g plan is censoring adult content. I also listened to a podcaster talk about renaming his podcast "talkings hit" to get passed the itunes criteria. The paper had some silly fluff article about Facebook and breastfeeding pictures. Youtube is stricter than TV on nudity (and laxer on violence).

These were all little corners of the internet up until recently and it seemed all right that they all have their own rules. Suddenly they pretty much are the internet and soon the will be the computer.

I don't like it.

llimllib• 14 years ago

Yesterday, Facebook wouldn't let me post a link to a pirate sports video stream, so they're censoring based on copyrights too.

cubicle67• 14 years ago

Youtube is stricter than TV on nudity

except for stuff like this (very NSFW just after the 8 minute mark) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLjRExyIBNM which somehow is still there

[Edit - it's Penn & Teller on Taxes, part 3]

blahedo2• 14 years ago

With only 3,000 viewers so far, perhaps it's just nobody's complained yet?

4ad• 14 years ago

Youtube restricts pornography not nudity.

grecy• 14 years ago

> Youtube is stricter than TV on nudity (and laxer on violence).

In your country. sigh

Many, many developed nations allow swearing, violence and nudity on TV at all times of the day.

whackberry• 14 years ago

Google was able to portray an image of being good and free and transparent early on in its existence. This image still lingers from their PR efforts but the reality is that Google is one of the most agressive corporations out there. Let's not demonize Google in particular, Sillicon Valley is brutal. But, let's also make clear that Google isn't some nice old lady that does no evil. Google spies on users just like Facebook, Google plays hardball with its monopoly in web search like Microsoft played monopoly with their OS. Google goes the whole nine yards in the Sillicon Valley dirty games and still these articles all mention "Google is open" or "how could Google do evil". Google has a PR team as good as or better than their programmers, that is a fact.

pixelcort• 14 years ago

There's a technological solution to situations like these: make a full screen, offline capable, mobile web app.

Discovery and charging for your mobile web app or for content within it may be challenging for the foreseeable future, but hopefully not forever.

Another issue is feature parity with native SDKs, which seems to be very slowly narrowing each year.

Ability to produce performant apps is another area with very slow but greater than zero progression.

For games, sure, go native and take advantage of the store discovery and payment platforms, access to all the APIs, and performance.

For other kinds of apps like these, maybe mobile web apps are a better idea.

Edit: clarification.

gcheong7• 14 years ago

There really needs to be a way to sell outside of the apple appstore without needing to jailbreak of your device. If the DOJ can sue Apple and the book publishers over an apparent attempt to destroy competition in the retail market, why wouldn't they be interested in how Apple is destroying developers' ability to freely publish apps and consumers to have choices besides Apple in the marketplace? How do we start a campaign to get them to look into this? Has anyone tried to file a suit of any kind to address this problem to date?

rbarooah9• 14 years ago

Why not just buy an android phone?

DHowett• 14 years ago

1) Notice that Google has removed this app too.

2) Carriers (AT&T) are known for disabling app sideloading.

3) Having to root your device presents the basic user with a major technical hurdle, and in some cases, an outright impossibility.

If you're going to advocate as an alternative an entire platform you can't guarantee freedom on, for freedom's sake, why advocate it?

septerr2• 14 years ago

Didn't know the app existed! Now that I know it did, I want it to be available. Not settling for kamasutra+.

septerr2• 14 years ago

Btw, ikamasutra.com can use a facelift. :/ It's kinda geocities looking right now. You should make it more web 2.0.

hsuresh• 14 years ago

As a developer, i'd really think hard about developing a native app. I know that some apps cannot go web based, but we need to push the boundaries of what is possible with mobile browsers. I can't think of any other way of keeping the mobile development open.

huggyface3• 14 years ago

"In the process we also removed even more illustration details from the Android version so it looked like the new iOS version"

That's a curious statement that makes you wonder which part of the story we don't know (was this a case of pushing boundaries, seeing what they could get away with?) It seems doubtful that we're hearing the full truth.

gcb• 14 years ago

Why people aren't building sites that work with everything and using the app merely to authenticate? That will allow you to capitalize via the *stores but not be hostage to it.

Some clueless people now will try to educate me that a native client is better, even it not having bookmarks, several tabs, browser extensions, pitch to zoom on every page, etc etc

victorbstan• 14 years ago

Actually Apple doesn't hate brunettes, what they hate is the likeness to reality that your brunette colored people are, where if you color the hair like in your second example, the people become less realistic and more like abstract icons; their hair being the exact same color as their body skin (yellow and red). Doesn't take a genius to figure this one out, but then it doesn't take a genius to write a bitching blog post either.

WiseWeasel• 14 years ago

They haven't approved the update with the new graphics either.

phil• 14 years ago

The crazy thing is the #4 paid app is this violent fantasy about shooting people with a sniper rifle and that's apparently OK:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clear-vision-17+/id500116670?...

The #5 paid app is a scam designed to confuse (check out the reviews):

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lock-my-screen/id507265508?mt...

ricardobeat2• 14 years ago

That's really curious. The "lock-screen" app has a Rated 4+ indication, yet it's actual ratings are 1-star. There's something fishy here, how come this doesn't get the appstore lords' attention?

therealarmen• 14 years ago

Rated 4+ refers to the approved age group, not average review rating.

IKamasutra: Apple Hates Brunettes

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