Banned (in 2008) from Apple's App Store, iBoobs finds refuge in Android Market
Here we go, folks. Mystic Game Development made quite the name for itself with its iBoobs app for the iPhone, which got itself banned from Apple's App Store in late 2008. Now it's found refuge …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is a two-and-a-half-year epilogue to a familiar fight. Mystic Game Development's iBoobs was pulled in Apple's late-2008 purge of suggestive apps, and the question of where rejected adult content goes was answered within a year when commentators noted Android had effectively become the porn-friendly storefront. By February 2010 Apple appeared to be formalizing things, prompting debate over whether it was banning sexual content from the App Store wholesale.
The significance of the March 2011 news is less one novelty app than what it says about the two marketplaces' diverging rules: Apple polices content tightly enough that even an Android-branded magazine app got banned from the App Store in November 2010, while Android Market positions itself as the refuge. For developers whose apps fail Apple's review, the choice of second platform is no longer incidental.
First-order effects
- Mystic Game Development finally has retail distribution for iBoobs more than two years after its iOS ban, via Android Market rather than any return to Apple.
- Android Market adds a category of titles — adult and borderline-suggestive apps — that the App Store structurally cannot carry.
Second-order effects
- Developers weighing a first platform have a concrete example that an App Store rejection is not a dead end but a routing decision toward Android, weakening Apple's gatekeeping as a developer lock-in mechanism.
- Apple's stricter content rules become a marketing contrast for Android, letting Google court the permissive-image audience without building anything itself.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, app-store approval policy hardens into a durable axis of platform competition alongside hardware and price — Apple trading catalog breadth for brand control, Android accepting reputational risk for openness.
The trend: Mobile app stores are splitting into curated and open camps, with Apple rejections increasingly feeding a parallel Android Market economy.