A new article from Wired.com highlights the potential repurcussions of Apple's latest move to remove certain apps from its highly popular App Store. Specifically, apps related to sex or "cookie-cutter" duplication were removed. It begs the question; are we on the path to higher quality or censorship?
About 5,000 apps were removed in February. These included overtly sexual apps, as well as apps made with app-generating services that simply reproduce website content. Apple has always boasted about its quantity of apps, having grown from 800 at launch time in mid-2008 to approximately 150,000 today. Compared with other services, Apple is the front runner by a very wide margin when it comes to the quantity of apps. Android has just over 19,000 and BlackBerry has about 4,700. But the question of quality vs quantity obviously comes into play.
Apple's new quality standards, while still ambiguous, are viewed by many app developers as a positive. Increasing the required quality will help to trim the fat from the bloated App Store, and force future apps to offer more value. But others may view this as the beginning of a wave of censorship. Today it's sexy content, but what about tomorrow?