News Bits: Porn? There's an App for That

Written by Erin Barker

Thursday, June 25. 2009 at 10:30 AM EDT 2 comments

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UPDATED -- Real live porn is now available via an iPhone app for the first time today, as "Hottest Girls" becomes the first officially sanctioned iTunes app to contain topless photos.

"We uploaded nude topless pics today. This is the first app to have nudity," developer Allen Leung announced proudly to Macenstein.

The $1.99 app for iPhone and iPod Touch previously showed only women clad in lingerie and bikinis. So why undress them now? Some have theorized that with the new parental controls built into the iPhone 3.0 SDK, Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) is feeling more permissive of nudity. And, let's face it, allowing porn opens the floodgates to a pretty profitable industry, and Apple does get a 30 percent cut.

Regardless, the app has been branded with a 17+ rating for "Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity" and "Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes."

UPDATE: This app has been pulled from iTunes this afternoon. According to Wired, Leung, the app's developer, claims that he made the decision himself and that the removal is temporary. Leung says on his Website that the app is "temporarily sold out" due to a server overload.

In other news:

According to Bloomberg, sites like Hulu LLC and CBS Interactive's TV.com attract more "committed viewers who actively seek out shows." Not to mention there's less commercial space available online -- a Simpsons episode on Hulu has only 37 seconds of ads, compared to nine minutes on broadcast TV.