Ah, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple and master of all you survey. You’re a highly moral man. We can tell from your serious expression, your steel-rimmed glasses and the turtlenecks you always wear. And if we need further proof, it seems you also want to keep porn out of our children’s hands.
You feel so strongly about the subject that you’re willing to publically chastise your old friends at Google. We asked a straight question: will you ever allow us to put applications on your mobile devices that you haven’t explicitly vetted? Your reply was surprising: ‘There’s a porn store for [Google’s] Android— you can download it, your kids can download it. That’s a place we don’t want to go, so we’re not going to.”
Hang on Steve, we weren’t talking about porn there were we? We were talking about applications in general. You know — card games, calorie counters — innocent stuff. You’ve sold over three billion of these babies already — we assumed you knew what we meant.
I can understand you not wanting porn in your store, Steve. Most porn is gross and it really doesn’t fit with Apple’s brand. And I can see why it’s different from the explicit lyrics in some of the 10-billion songs you’ve sold on iTunes. That’s music, which is, like, art.
But we weren’t talking about your store Steve, we were talking about my iPhone. Why can’t I put whatever software I want on it? Didn’t I buy it from you? I’m sure I remember giving you the money.
You know Steve, this is sounding more and more like you don’t want anyone horning in on your racket and less and less like a moral crusade. If you let everyone put whatever they want on their iPhones, iPods and iPads, then they won’t visit your app store as much, and that would suck.
I might have given you the benefit of the doubt, but then you go and reject an app made by Mike Fiore, a (now) Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist, because it “ridicules public figures”. Come on Steve, that’s the kind of Microsoft-style blunder you used to laugh at.
Sure, you admitted it was a mistake (and took another pop at Android), but here’s what really worries me: you rejected that app way back in December 2009. It took you until now — a week after the dude won his Pulitzer Prize — to wake up and realise your mistake.
I think Mike sums it up best himself: “Sure, mine might get approved, but what about someone who hasn’t won a Pulitzer and who is maybe making a better political app than mine? Do you need some media frenzy to get an app approved that has political material?”
See Steve, this is the whole problem with closed ecosystems, they make those in charge of them into control freaks. They start to play god. I don’t need you to make moral decisions for me Steve. And besides, if I wanted to look at porn I could just use the Safari browser on my iPhone. That’s one of your apps isn’t it?
I still love my iPhone Steve, but the big brother shtick is getting tired. You guys are best at making cool gadgets. Stick to that and leave the social engineering to the politicians, ’cause right now you’re just harshing everyone’s iPad buzz.
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