Monday, February 22, 2010 6:09 PM

Indeed, such behavior by Apple has led many of us to 'jailbreak' our iP(hone|od) devices.

Pity Apple for developing, then loosing control of, the platform because they conflated convenient morality (as the platform is now "maturing", sexy apps have become "bad"), computing safety (the ostensible purpose of AppStore screening is to prevent misbehaving applications from entering the system, so sexy=misbehaving?), and their corporate interests ('misbehaving' obviously also means providing a service or function which may threaten the business model of Apple or its corporate partners [see: Google Voice app, AT&T]).

If Apple was serious about computing safety, they'd provide two levels of device operation: 'nanny state' - which Apple would be free to manipulate at their whim and yank applications for no consistent reason; and 'grown up' - which Apple must leave alone except for truly misbehaving or malicious applications. However Apple's de facto operational levels for these devices are: 'nanny state' and 'jailbroken' (which circumvents all of Apple's controls).

This is unfortunate, as many of us are actually 'grown ups'. We can constantly chafe at the nannied restrictions or decline to live with the arbitrary and capricious actions of the corporate nanny. To use our iP(hone|od|ad) devices as we desire, we have no option but to apply a jailbreak and open our devices to software distribution channels which bypass Apple.

If Apple nixes Grindr, the effort required of Grindr to switch to a non-Apple distribution channel is trifling. And the devices of all the guys who enjoy window-shopping with Grindr will all soon become jailbroken. No longer suffering under Apple's restrictions, Grindr's profiles can then be as clear and plainspoken and revealing as the community wishes them to be. That doesn't seem like a bad thing.

BTW: The whole question of what's 'too sexy' for the AppStore raises the question of 'community standards.' Apple's policies seem to assume that there is a monolithic 'community standard' which should apply to all communities. If this is the case, one may rightly ask which community's standards are given priority, who gets to decide, and why. I'd suggest that Apple would be much better off asking each device owner what community standards they wish to observe and filtering the app store view for that device consistent with those standards.

Garland

Tuesday, March 23, 2010 5:17 AM

As of around 12am PST, Grindr and GrindrX are no longer on the app store

Neal