Apple continues to dick about with App Store policies: Explicit apps might be ok now [Scratch that]

On Monday, if you were a developer of adult themed mobile apps for the iPhone platform, you were screwed. You were in the middle of packing up your bags and heading out to another segment of the industry. You’d already phoned your investors, suppliers and colleagues to tell them it was ‘game over’ and you were busy investigating other application ideas — and perhaps looking at some other mobile app platforms to work on.

On Wednesday evening, you pressed pause.

Yeah. It’s back on.

Maybe.

Eric Slivka over at MacRumours is reporting that — no, it was all a big misunderstanding! Apple didn’t mean it. When they said they’d pulled 5,000 apps, they… well, you should have known! They didn’t actually mean that.

Have they reconsidered their decision to remove all explicit apps? No. They have redefined the market.

😉

Eric has confirmed that Apple has:

… now added a new “Explicit” category in the iTunes Connect system for App Store submissions. The category is included in drop-down menus that allow developers to select categories for their applications to be placed in, and appears alongside the traditional App Store categories such as “Books”, “Entertainment”, and “Games”.

Who knows?

You have to wonder why Apple didn’t simply introduce the new category on Monday. No one would have complained. No one would have challenged it. Indeed, I’m sure a lot of developers would have welcomed the clarifying move.

But now that Apple has taken the temperature of the market and found it raaaather hot, it appears that they’ve done a u-turn. This is good news for developers. But a total waste of time and resources for them too.

Will there be a new explicit category? Well, there appears to be one already. But what does it mean? Does that mean that all 5,000 must be re-submitted there?

Could we have some clarity please, Apple?

And, have you got any more hairbrained schemes that developers should know about? Any plans to remove all the sports applications (apart from ESPN, MLB, NFL, etc.,) for some arbitrary reason? Just … do let us know.

Update: Ok, they are dicking about some more. MobileCrunch reports that the ‘Explicit’ category has now been wiped from the Apple memory.