Apple, It's Time to Delete Safari From the iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Apple, It's Time to Delete Safari From the iPhone

gizmodo.com

First comment at the article makes a rather solid point: when it ran an initial story this morning about the app being approved, Gizmodo characterized Forchan as a "porn app":

http://gizmodo.com/5445065/apple-approves-porn-app-in-under-...

But now that it's been pulled from the store, Gizmodo changes to representing it as "exactly the same as Safari" and downplays the porn aspect.

(and note that the two Gizmodo stories were posted 90 minutes apart -- amazing how quickly Gizmodo moved to completely reframe the story...)

The two articles were even written by the same person, Jesus Diaz.

To be fair, that first story ends by saying forChan is "truly innocuous until you enter a web address in the URL field", that removing it would "set yet another dangerous precedent", and that Safari "does exactly what forChan does".

while the developer mentions that it could be used to browse pictures of fully naked girls—and has some boards with that kind of pictures...

There's your difference. Apple takes pains not to brand Safari as an app for surfing porn.

For example, I don't think I've ever seen an Apple site explain just what "Private Browsing" mode is designed for... ;)

If you want to do business with Apple you've got to think about such things.

It is nothing more than a image-only web browser, right? How does Gizmodo's framing of the story change the facts?

Primarily because the first sensationalist article may very well be both the way Apple found out about this app and the very reason they had to clamp down on it - if <conservative parent> sees that gizmodo headline taken up elsewhere, they could be very reasonably expected to think "oh no! Little Timmy has an iphone! He can now look at pornography!"

The second article is another sensationalist piece, but this is made much worse by the fact it is feeding off the very activity it probably caused with the first.

If your newspaper of choice ran a story decrying a particular building as the source of all the worst crime in the city one day, and after a police crackdown ran a piece talking about police abusing their powers or judges granting search warrants willy-nilly, would you be okay with it?

I'm not sure the app is (was) a pure image browser. The dev said: "There is currently over 100,000 pics spread between 15 categories with much much more coming soon." The "categories" thing makes no sense unless the app was able to associate specific sites/boards with certain categories ("blondes, brunettes...") somehow, either by linking to the boards directly or by detecting a "known" categorized board/subboard when the user browsed to it.

Bottom line is that if there were any nudity/porn sites included in the URLs that enabled the "category" feature, the takedown was probably justified.

What's so complicated about this? Apple likes to control every aspect of its products. Apple's customers like this.

If you don't like how Apple sanitizes the "Apple Experience" then buy an Android phone.

I'd be OK with this if the network effect didn't exist. If the iPhone becomes the de facto standard, it's a loss for mobile developers everywhere.

Mac users generally got along OK when Windows was the de facto standard on desktops (i.e. now). If the iPhone becomes the de facto standard, I suspect users of the next runner up platform or two will still get along OK.

I mean, I've never been big into any apple products in the past, but I've know a lot of people over the years who were very satisfied with their Macs.

Windows being the de facto standard was bad. It held the web back for years, because Internet Explorer remained stagnant.

Yeah like beofre the iPhone developing for mobile was such a blizz.

I'm not arguing against what the iPhone did, but rather what it could do. While its introduction was revolutionary in making mobile development open, that doesn't mean it's ideal. We've reached a local maxima, but Android is most certainly an improvement in terms of openness.

I don't think it's so clear cut.

People know the internet. They know it contains a ton of crap, obscene stuff, NSFW etc. That's fine. Great.

Apps on the other hand, people have different expectations for. Especially if they're paying for them.

I (as an Apple customer), don't really care about the app store. I like the fact it gave me an ssh client for my iPhone, but that's about it. If it hadn't I could have used a webapp.

I firmly believe the app store is just a short term stop gap until everyone has 24/7 connectivity. Why would I bother downloading (and purchasing) apps, which are just duplication of functionality found on the web.

The web is the future man, and safari is the best mobile browser at the moment. But I agree. If you don't like it, buy another phone.

This article fails to mention what rating the app was submitted with. Seems like a crucial point. We know Apple doesn't allow pornography-specific apps but they have allowed in general purpose applications that could be used for this purpose in the past but they have to carry a mature rating since Apple cannot vouch for the content. It would be really trashy if they submitted this as a kid safe application that defeats parental controls. Not sure that's the case, since Gizmodo didn't bother to cover it, but it would be interesting to know what rating this app was submitted with.

Obviously the situations are different -- vastly so. First of all, safari doesn't sound like the name of a scary anti social networking site, it sounds like an adventure instead! Second, since apple can do no wrong (in its own mind), porn in safari must be a hack, and probably violates TOS and warranty.

Edit: forgot the :P, but it is a joke

I suppose the parent comment was being sarcastic.

Safari can also mean an adventure (using essentially slave labor) to illegally kill lions and elephants. The name forChan doesn't mean the same thing to non-IT-geeks.

This seems to be just another case of the App Store behaving badly (unless there is more to the story, like malware). It is very unfortunate that Apple is profiting so well from the App Store model. I can imagine many companies wanting to replicate the closed-platform, you must use our one store model. Its a shame to see free markets devolve.

Indeed -- it was a mocking reply to a snarky article. Unfortunately it seems inventing absurd positions to justify someone else's behaviour is a form of humor lost on people here.

Or people didn't think the attempt at humor was funny and was just noise. As I've said here before, you're probably not as funny as you think you are.

I can accept that, but why not stop at -1? Why keep downvoting -- unfunny joke does not need to be beaten down the same way racist troll does.

Maybe they do - while one is morally inferior to the other, they're both noise. (If there was not a limit at -4, I suspect a racist troll would eventually go more negative than a simply unfunny attempt at humor.)

Or people on HN don't have a sense of humor (which has been my experience).

Poe's Law: http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Poe%27s_Law

Doesn't Safari for iPhone come with parental controls? That could be one difference right there.

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