App Store controversies are not new to Apple. However, for a while it seemed that the company was trying to stay away from such incidents. However, today the company has courted fresh controversy over the removal of an iPhone app from the App Store. The reason behind the removal? The iPhone app could be used to access porn from third party servers - very much like any normal web browser.
The iPhone app in question, forChan, is developed by the app development company iHustleApps. This iPhone app, which retailed at $0.99 at the App Store, let users connect to any imageboard site and surf through the pictures from their server. To put it simply, it was photo-viewing web browser. The app was not completely innocuous though. It listed all the popular imageboards in categories and there were close to 15 "adults only" sections. The app was initially approved by Apple only to be later pulled off over concerns that the iPhone app was giving users access to porn.
While the app developer was without doubt offering users access to porn implicitly, it does not actually make this a porn app. As folks at Gizmodo have noted, the app offers access to third party porn in very much the same way as iPhone's Safari web browser does. On a similar line of thought, the Google iPhone app too could serve to deliver results that are not family-friendly when the SafeSearch filter is not turned on. That being the case, Apple's decision to pull out forChan from the App Store does not make much sense.
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