Steve Jobs On Why The iPhone Doesn’t Allow Unsigned Apps: They Don’t Want A Porn Store
Today, during a Q&A session at Apple’s iPhone 4.0 Developer preview, gdgt co-founder Ryan Block asked Steve Jobs a question many of us have wondered for years: “Are there any plans to allow unsigned applications on the iPhone?†His response:
You know, there’s a porn store for Android. You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go – so we’re not going to go there.
The answer — that the iPhone will not allow for unsigned apps — does not come as a surprise. But Jobs’s reasoning behind it was certainly interesting to hear. Because it’s a clear example of Apple’s hypocrisy.
For years, iTunes has sold songs with explicit lyrics and movies with graphic nudity. Further, as we’ve pointed out numerous times, the iPhone comes with Safari. The web has quite a bit of porn on it. Hell, many porn sites have even launched HTML5 versions that are optimized for the iPhone. Yes, parents can disable access to Safari with parental controls, but Apple could easily add a similar parental control setting to restrict running unsigned applications, too.
techcrunch.com