Over the last few days, Apple has removed a number of apps from the app store that have, as the New York Times’s Jenna Wortham put it “sexually suggestive” material.  There is plenty of speculation on the motives, such as VentureBeat’s idea that this is about winning over educators to the iPad.  I think the actual explanation is likely to be simpler.

Browsing and discovery are broken in the app store.  If these were working well, then there would be no need to remove apps like this (for any reason).  Instead, they would be visible only to those specifically searching for them.  Imagine coming to the Google home page and finding a list of the most popular web pages in various categories.  Unfiltered I am pretty sure that would include a bunch of porn.  This could be one source of complaints but I suspect that access by children is more important.

Theoretically parental controls are supposed to help keep this content away from children, but that of course requires some non-trivial configuration, as this tutorial shows.  I believe that most people buy iPod Touches or even iPhones for their kids and simply hand them over without ever going through these steps (we didn’t – but that’s because we don’t believe in filtering for kids – more on that in a separate blog post).  Without these controls “questionable” apps are just 1-click away for kids.

Phil Schiller cites “customer complaints from women” in his NYT interview as the reason for the app removal.  Based on the above, I suspect many if not most of them are mothers who discover that their children have actually purchased “inappropriate” apps (as opposed to just browsed the web).  There were a huge number of iPod Touches given as Christmas presents this year and the timing of this removal could be the result of that.

I am surprised that Apple did not solve this problem by defaulting to a “safe mode” (and fixing app store browsing/discovery), but instead resorted to removing the apps.  This suggests that there are technology issues behind the scenes that prevent them from making sufficiently rapid changes to the App Store.