Windows Phone 7 Marketplace Will Be Porn-Free, Just Like App Store
Cupertino’s got a lot of flack for their prudish stance on adult-oriented applications on the App Store, with Steve Jobs himself famously saying that if revolutions are about freedom, than the iPad is revolutionary because of its freedom from porn.
Regardless about how you may feel about Apple censoring the content an adult can consume on a device that he owns, though, at least Apple’s not going to be alone in ridding their app marketplace of all adult content: Microsoft plans to do the same thing with their Windows Phone 7 Marketplace when it launches later in the year.
In truth, this is smart of Microsoft: by keeping their Windows Phone 7 Marketplace clear of porn and adult content from the beginning, they avoid the backlash that Apple faced when they pulled adult applications well within the App Store’s lifecycle.
Windows Phone 7 Marketplace is taking the lead from the App Store in other ways. Just like the App Store, developers will have to pay a $99 a year membership fee, and any apps sold will net them a 70/30 profit split. They are much stingier than Apple when it comes to free applications, though: Microsoft will only let developers submit five free aplications a year, with subsequent free apps costing $19.99 to submit for approval.
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This is clearly meant to prevent mass submission of junk applications, but it’s also a strange move from Microsoft: with the App Store a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut and now a billion dollar industry, Microsoft needs to be bettering Apple’s developer terms to grow the ecosystem it needs to compete. They are hardly in a position to dictate terms.
One way that Microsoft is really differentiating itself from the App Store, though, is by allowing for time-limited trial modes: developers won’t have to offer separate demo apps to pull potential customers in, but can submit just a single executable. That would be a welcome change to the current App Store policy.
John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him ![Read "Why You’ll Probably Never Own A Mac With An ARM Processor [Feature]"](http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/macbookairarm-300x250.jpg "Read \"Why You’ll Probably Never Own A Mac With An ARM Processor [Feature]\"")
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