Well, here’s one for the record books. Apple just rejected a developer’s app for violating its policies against pornographic content.
Nothing weird about that, except for the way that Apple went about it: by sending that developer pictures of a dude masturbating. What?
In a hysterical post over at Medium, developer Carl Smith talks about how Apple went about rejecting a new app that could be used — inadvertently — to view porn:
It turns out Apple thought the best way to tell us our app could be used to surf porn was to surf for porn using our app. Then send us some pictures and say take a look at these! Except they said, “Please see the attached screenshot for more information.” So with no warning…
CLICK — Well hello there handsome!
And here’s the (very) censored pic:
Smith says he understands Apple’s point: they wanted his company to improve the ability to flag inappropriate content in the app.
But needless to say, Smith thinks there were better ways for Apple to prove that the app could potentially be pornographic:
Apple sent us pornography without trying to mask it and with no warning of what we were going to see. This means they exposed employees of my company to things Apple themselves said was objectionable. How is this acceptable?
Frankly, this sounds like a one-off blunder on the part of an App Store review team member, and not something Cupertino is likely to make a habit of.
As far as I’m concerned, though, if Apple’s going to start sending porn to every developer who gets his app rejected, though, maybe it’s time to submit more apps!
Source: Medium
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
