In recent news, Apple announced the removal of all things cleavage, subsequently removing 5,000 sexual applications from the App Store. However, they did not remove every single provocative app in the store. Sports Illustrated"s swimsuit issue, as well as Playboy"s official app, were both still available after the "clean-up." This led many to believe that Apple was being hypocritical and playing favorite towards large, and powerful, companies.
However, new evidence leads us to believe that perhaps they were just gearing up for a new submission category. Perhaps the two apps mentioned above were already pre-categorized, due to their extremely popular and socially accepted nature. It"s unclear why such a route wasn"t taken with other apps. Perhaps apps that solely exist to profit from sexually explicit images alone don"t have a place in Apple"s "technopolis," if you will.
Cult of Mac is reporting that Apple has created a new "Explicit" category for app submissions. The category shows up when someone tries adding a new app to iTunesConnect. Could it be that Apple never intended to permanently ban all boob boucing and sexually related apps? It will be interesting to see what becomes of this new category. So far, nothing "Explicit" has shown up in the App Store since it appeared.
UPDATE: Gizmodo is reporting that the "Explicit" option is now gone. Apple has, apparently, confirmed the removal.