Apple PR confirms: Hottest Girls app was removed
On Thursday morning, developer Allen Leung’s Hottest Girls iPhone app, a $1.99 download that showed pictures of Asian women in lingerie, began displaying topless models. I’m from California, so whatever, but the app seemed to fly in the face of Apple’s stated no-porn policy.
Within a few hours, Hottest Girls was disabled from being searched or downloaded. You could look at the app’s entry if you had its iTunes URL, but you couldn’t have it.
Leung wrote on his blog that he, not Apple, had disabled the app: “The server usage is extremely high because of the popularity of this app. Thus, by not distributing the app, we can prevent our servers from crashing.” Leung later wrote that “our servers are being hacked and overloaded.”
This morning, Apple PR representative Tom Neumayr issued a statement that contradicts Leung’s story:
Apple will not distribute applications that contain inappropriate content, such as pornography. The developer of this application added inappropriate content directly from their server after the application had been approved and distributed, and after the developer had subsequently been asked to remove some offensive content. This was a direct violation of the terms of the iPhone Developer Program. The application is no longer available on the App Store.
Who’s telling the truth? I have a trained reporter’s reaction to disbelieve any statement issued by a PR person. But Leung, so cocky and self-promoting yesterday, has now taken down his website content. I doubt it’s because he’s shy.
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About the Author, Paul Boutin
Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.
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