One App’s Art Is Apple’s ‘Pornography’

Posted on Jan 22, 2013

Screenshot of 500px

Apple’s late CEO Steve Jobs once told an irritated blogger that the iPhone offered “freedom from porn,” but what about freedom from artsy photography?

The company pulled photo-sharing app 500px from its App Store after deciding that it was a vehicle for pornography. Worse, Apple has said it “received customer complaints about possible child pornography.”

500px COO Evgeny Tchebotarev told The Verge, “We’ve never ever, since the beginning of the company, received a single complaint about child pornography. If something like that ever happened, it would be reported right away to enforcement agencies.”

Apple is famously strict about its app approval process. As of this posting, 500px was available on the rival Android Play store, where it had more than 100,000 downloads. This blogger was able to spot a pretentious looking breast in a black and white photograph, although most of 500px’s main page featured over-Photoshopped pictures of animals and landscapes.

—Posted by Peter Z. Scheer. Follow him on Twitter: @peesch.

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