Apple, sex and Bongo Babes – why we’re not upset.

Posted on March 15th, 2010

A few weeks ago Apple removed many existing apps from their iPhone store. These were pretty much all related to sexual content in some way.

It was a highly publicized move with a lot of press coverage and many many developers complaining about the unfair treatment.

Unsurprisingly our app/game Bongo Babes was one of those affected and pulled from the store. Thankfully this wasn’t one of our main income generators so we didn’t feel the effects as strongly as some developers.

In fact, I’d almost say we’re not too bothered, it’s possibly even a good thing for MBXGames for many reasons:

• * We developed the app to get experience of Objective-C
• * We had a showcase piece on the iPhone allowing us to confidently offer it as a service to clients.
• * We specifically chose a topic we knew would be hard to get into the app store – this meant we experienced the full pain and hoops of a difficult submission process to Apple.
• * We ran the app for most of it’s life at various price points and could measure the effect on sales.
• * The final few weeks before it was pulled we made the app free and downloads increased a hundred fold. For advergame type software, “free” is clearly the way forward to get your brand in front of as many users as possible.
• * Bongo Babes was hacked and appeared on torrent sites within a few days – we now know how to raise the bar slightly higher to avoid this for a longer period after launch.
• * Following it’s removal, we’re looking at the jailbreak scene and maybe releasing on there – just to see what else we can learn from this one piece of software…
• * We had fun making it.

We always knew it may not have ever been accepted, and once it had, it may be pulled – that’s part of the very restrictive set of rules Apple makes you agree to when you sign up.

I may not agree on a personal level with the way Apple is cleaning out the store and removing anything adult related, but I can see from a business case why they are. I’ll post more thoughts on that and what Apple should really do, in the next few days.