Apple has been legally required to approve a pornography app for iPhone users in EU markets due to regulatory actions put in place by Europe’s Digital Markets Act. Since launching the App Store in 2008, Apple’s policy has been to prevent apps explicitly for distributing pornography from being listed in the App Store.
As of today, however, EU iPhone users can access Hot Tub, an app for browsing pornography, as easily as downloading Epic’s Fortnite or Delta, the popular Nintendo game emulator.
That’s because Hot Tub is distributed through AltStore PAL.
Prior to today, AltStore PAL has largely been viewed as a generally harmless avenue for developers to distribute software for the iPhone without being required to agree to Apple’s revenue split policies.
However, the arrival of Hot Tub, which lacks age verification for access, shows that at least one of Apple’s concerns over a less moderated app marketplace has become reality.
In a Fast Company piece published on this date a year ago, Apple’s Phil Schiller warned of the possibility of porn apps being distributed alongside game apps that are popular with kids
Schiller is quick to point out that despite these new security measures, there are limits to the protections that Apple can provide to users who allow alternative app marketplaces to operate on their iPhones. The company has virtually no control over the content of apps from those marketplaces—even if that content is objectionable or harmful.
“Ultimately, there are things that we have not allowed on our App Store—things that we didn’t think would be safe or appropriate,” Schiller says. “It will not be our decision whether those other marketplaces have the same terms and limitations.”
So yes, for the first time, apps dedicated to pornography can be run on the iPhone. This should be something parents are aware of, because the DMA does not give Apple the legal right to forbid certain types of app stores from operating on its platform, nor does Apple have the ability to prevent a child from downloading such an app store onto their iPhone.
One year to the day of that story being published, a porn app is being distributed in the same channel as Nintendo emulators and Fortnite.
AltStore PAL required an annual subscription for access until last August, when Fortnite maker Epic Games provided AltStore PAL with a grant to offset the costs associated with providing the alternative app marketplace.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney hasn’t expressed how he feels about the porn app being listed alongside Fortnite with the help of his company. He may very well approve and welcome the app’s availability considering this was always expected to happen eventually.
The bottom line for parents, though, is that the ‘Apple-approved’ messaging around the porn app on iPhone omits the fact that Apple is legally required to approve the app due to the DMA policy, which the company has campaigned against.
There is a nuanced argument that could be made where Apple’s business practices created the conditions that allowed the company to have to legally approve a porn app on iPhone for EU customers without strict parental controls. But describing the porn app as simply Apple-approved is intentionally clever and misleading.
And what about porn access through Safari? Apple’s Screen Time protections and third-party content blockers allow parents to restrict access to explicit content on the web.
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