IKamasutra: Apple Hates Brunettes

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.<p>Especially if the producer is willing to change the product to fit your requirements.<p>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?<p>I really hope that this issue is solved to the satisfaction of every party involved and the app will be back soon.<p>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...

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 <i>very skilled</i> 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.<p>Maybe they could improve the process with the following schema:<p>* 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".<p>* If the score is 4 or 5, go forward. If the score is &#60;= 3 send it to a more expert reviewer that will do an in depth analysis.<p>Optionally also discard the app if the average score is &#60;= 1.5 if there are problems with the "load" of the experts.

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.

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.

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.<p>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.<p>It seems though that Apple particularly feel that its customers require a squeaky clean filter to assess everything they access.<p>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.<p>It is really sad to see Google following this path of over-censorship..

slightly off topic.<p>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).<p>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 <i>are</i> the internet and soon the will be the computer.<p>I don't like it.

The crazy thing is the #4 paid app is this violent fantasy about shooting people with a sniper rifle and that's apparently OK:<p><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clear-vision-17+/id500116670?mt=8" rel="nofollow">http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clear-vision-17+/id500116670?...</a><p>The #5 paid app is a scam designed to confuse (check out the reviews):<p><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lock-my-screen/id507265508?mt=8" rel="nofollow">http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lock-my-screen/id507265508?mt...</a>

There's a technological solution to situations like these: make a full screen, offline capable, mobile web app.<p>Discovery and charging for your mobile web app or for content within it may be challenging for the foreseeable future, but hopefully not forever.<p>Another issue is feature parity with native SDKs, which seems to be very slowly narrowing each year.<p>Ability to produce performant apps is another area with very slow but greater than zero progression.<p>For games, sure, go native and take advantage of the store discovery and payment platforms, access to all the APIs, and performance.<p>For other kinds of apps like these, maybe mobile web apps are a better idea.<p><i></i>Edit:<i></i> clarification.

Nice job Apple and Google, nice job.<p>If I were in charge, person who made the call would be out of job.<p>And if this was "company" decision, well, good luck to you all, and move to Europe. We love brunettes here.

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?

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

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).<p>(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.)

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.

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

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.<p>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).<p>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.

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.

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.

Unless the title of the blog post has been changed since submission to HN, why the editorialised title?<p>Edit: I've since learnt that that is actually the title of the post. It still seems kind of sensationalist none-the-less.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.<p>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

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