In the last few months, Steve Jobs appears to have taken every single opportunity he is given, from OS 4’s announcement to random emails with normal people, to equate the Android platform with pornography and pronounce the iPhone App Store as the shining beacon of the mobile app market.
If you look past the surface of the claims, however, you start to see a company bent on retaining its image and cash flow, and Jobs has seized on pornography as the banner around which Apple will rally. Unfortunately, porn is only being used as a scapegoat, and it’s been trotted out with enough consistency and regularity that it’s almost taken the air of a fear-mongering politician keeping on message.
Porn as the scapegoat
The porn attack is based around the competing app distribution systems: the iPhone’s is closed and moderated, while anything can be submitted and listed on the Android Market. The App Store will never be open to everybody, this much has been stated time and again. It is critical to Apple that it has the opportunity to scrub every app that goes to the mass of iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users. The leading reason? It’s probably the 30% Apple gets off the top of the official App Store sales. The given reason? Jobs says porn apps:
You know, there’s a porn store for Android. You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go – so we’re not going to go there.
In an email exchange regarding Pulitzer prize-winning satirist Mark Fiore’s application, rejected due to a policy that forbids applications from mocking or making fun of others, Jobs went even further.
Fiore’s app will be in the store shortly. That was a mistake. However, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy and [sic] Android phone.
And when Gawker’s Ryan Tate snapped after seeing an ad call the iPad “revolutionary,” he shot off an email saying that “revolutions are about freedom,” which netted this outstanding response from Jobs:
Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times, they are a changin’, and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.
… And you might care more about porn when you have kids…
At least Jobs presents a uniform front: one that guarantees that he knows, better than you, exactly what you need (and don’t). But, wait a second, this is a lengthy exchange with Tate. Jobs continues!
Gosh, why are you so bitter over a technical issue such as this? It’s not about freedom, its [sic] about Apple trying to do the right thing for its users…. As for us, we’re just doing what we can to try and make (and preserve) the user experience we envision. You can disagree with us, but our motives are pure.
So, let’s be careful with our words: Steve Jobs is freeing you from the things to which he thinks you shouldn’t be exposed. He makes no bones about it. Apple is the moral and Internet police, protecting you from buggy Flash and vile pornography in one fell swoop. . . well, excepting those dedicated iPhone porn sites. Let’s just pretend those don’t exist.
These are not good reasons. Let’s be honest: the reason Apple won’t allow porn apps is because Apple (and Steve Jobs) don’t want to be associated with porn apps, and the reason they’ll never allow unsigned apps is that they don’t want to give up the App Store cash flow. The remaining points are completely disingenuous arguments that trivialize the realities of the situation. The proof also lies in what Jobs doesn’t do.
WWSJND?
If pornography is such a monster, why stop at the mobile space? Why not implement the same kind of scrubbing on the desktop? To the pessimistic, it’s merely because Apple has no means of censoring the entire Internet. To a realist, it’s because Apple can’t feasibly limit their desktops to Apple-approved software, as that flies in the face of a few decades of user expectations. It also means Jobs is just hiding behind the specter of pornography and the children to hold onto his little walled garden.
Guess what, Steve? iPhones, iPod Touches, iPads–they’re all computers. You can claim they’re a different paradigm all you want, but it’s just an artificial construct. If you’re going to censor one kind of computer, at least have the decency to censor all of your computers.
And, while we’re talking about porn, here’s another thing that Steve Jobs won’t do: overhaul the iPhone’s parental controls. When the iPhone first came out, the available parental controls were laughable at best. There were no granular controls: you either allowed everything, or you broadly disabled features of the phone, such as the camera or Safari. Imagine receiving a smartphone that wouldn’t let you view the web, install applications, view YouTube, or take pictures.
With last year’s advent of iPhone OS 3.x, however, the world expected a little more. The parental controls were refined, adding the ability to filter app store downloads by age, in addition to the same old ham-fisted controls. You could, for example, opt to restrict your child to apps rated below 12+, or movies rated PG-13. These parental control changes opened the door to additional consumer choice; perhaps consumers could decide what was suitable for themselves and their children.
Then there came a sweeping change from Cupertino: Apple cracked down, and hard, on applications that it deemed too racy. The company’s uneven crackdown banned scores of apps but, strangely, left those from Playboy, FHM and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit alone. In effect, Apple banned every racy app except the ones most lucrative to Apple–hypocrisy at its finest. But the ban also had secondary layer of hypocrisy, which TechCrunch cited:
Most worrying is that “sexy” applications were already blocked at one point until Apple specifically changed its policies to begin letting them in. It was only a little over a year ago that the words “Boobs” and “Booty” in an application’s description weren’t allowed. But Apple made the conscious decision to lift that ban. In effect, Apple sent a message to developers that on a platform where the rules are nebulous and anything innovative is risky, these applications were safe. Now it’s changing its mind.
In one sweeping move, Apple pulled the rug out from under a host of developers who were originally allowed to sell their apps. Meanwhile, the Playboy app remains for sale. This all conveniently occurred just before Jobs began his tirade against the porn-filled Android Market–he was cleaning house so the high moral ground was available to claim.
The hypocrisy
So what’s it going to be for Apple? One can’t implement good parental controls and then not let parents use them just because you like the sound of “no porn apps.” One can’t ban all sexy apps except for the big hitters and call it the high road. One can’t say it’s about freedom, then flip to mass enforcement of morality. That’s not freedom, and Apple is by no means everybody’s doting father. Is a little internal consistency too much to ask for?
In the mean time, we know that Android’s more than a little threatening to Apple’s dominance, but it seems far less disingenuous to restrict criticism to the merits of the devices and their operating systems. While Catholic Online may really appreciate the “favor” Apple is doing the world, much of the world would rather hear about how awesome Apple’s devices are, not how clean their app store is–they are, after all, supposed to have parental controls for that.
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