I agree - Telegram's not ideal. But the reason they try and police adult content is because they're afraid of Apple booting them off the App store.
That is completely ridiculous and if that is the reason Telegram is policing adult content then Telegram is ran by idiots. You can use any IM app to share adult content, there are plenty of groups on Whatsapp sharing porn, there are plenty of groups in iMessage sharing porn, there are porn accounts on Instagram and twitter, hell the entire reason snapchat even exists is so that you can send self destructing nudes to people.
The idea that an app will be banned due to content shared with people using the app, and not uploaded and/or hosted on some public website accessible to anyone (CP on tumblr) sounds completely ridiculous to me.
A thought: I hear that most of the complaints about “adult” TV channels crossing the line from “broadcastable” to “violating obscenity laws” are made by their competitors. Perhaps a similar thing happens here? That at least one of Telegram’s competitors constantly look for reasons to get them blocked from the App Store?
And it would be mostly due to public perception. Telegram is "used by terrorists because secret encryption" and already seen as suspicious.
Yes they will, if they're on channels (which are considered public).
Not only are Whatsapp groups and Snapchat chats are considered private, those companies have much more clout (and lawyers) than Telegram. Facebook threatening to remove Instagram/Facebook/Whatsapp from iOS would hurt Apple more than Facebook.
Side note: Even lists with no adult content, but referring to adult activities get banned. The creator of an app listing Burning Man events had to remove all references to adult workshops or get the banhammer. Apple's walled garden, Apple's rules (sigh).
- Instagram is stock full of sexual content
- A ton of cam models have private snapchat accounts where they share porn of themselves
- Reddit is basically a cornucopia of porn
- I can subscribe to a porn email list
- Share nudes to a group of friends on Facebook or even SMS
- I can join a hundred Discord channel to satisfy every single weird ass fetish I have,
- I can outright buy porn from Amazon and have it home delivered in 30 minutes.
And that's just from the top of my head. I'm sure you can find a metric ton of other apps that provide their users with easy access to sexual content. None of those apps will be banned for it since that is not the primary purpose of any of these apps. It's simply something that you're able to do with the tools provided. This is like banning all knives just because someone got stabbed.
If your plan is to ban apps that provide access to pornographic content, then you're gonna have to do a lot of banning.
Tumblr itself wasn't banned for porn, it was banned for child porn https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-...
I would also argue that a public blogsite where tagging and discovering new content is one of the key selling points of the platform, is very different from a Telegram channel where you need to specifically know the channel name to even join. As long as Telegram puts forth their best effort to eliminate illegal content from channels, they should be fine.
You are trying to find a reasoning in Apple's decisions, but isn't it easier to assume that not all apps are equally welcome in a private app store?
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/31/17412396/telegram-apple-a...
Telegram folks are just afraid that obscenity laws will be used against them by officially-not-censoring-but-actually-pretty-curious-about-everyone's-communications governments, like UK, France, Italy, and so on. "Oh, you cannot police your underage nudes? Law says we have to do it then, hand over the keys or shut it all down. We will absolutely not use these keys for anything else, honestly, uh-uh..."
That's the charitable reading that doesn't insult anyone's intelligence. I still don't particularly trust Telegram not to cooperate with authorities anyway - any centralized model is doomed to, at some point.