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Comment by Pewpewarrows | Hacker News Reader

For any curious devs: the distinction between this and the reason why web browsers (like Chrome, Dolphin, or Firefox) aren't banned, according to Google at least, is direct linking. An app is allowed to "browse" to NSFW material, but cannot explicitly link (or come pre-loaded with favorites or bookmarks) to said material.

That said, this is still an awful and draconian policy. I wouldn't have batted an eyelash if this was a news story coming from Apple's App Store, because that's just par for the course in their ecosystem. I love what Android used to stand for, but lately I'm finding it harder to stand by my principles, with Apple providing a very enticing walled garden that's getting harder to avoid.

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An app is allowed to "browse" to NSFW material, but cannot explicitly link (or come pre-loaded with favorites or bookmarks) to said material.

We sell a Reddit image-browsing client on the iOS App Store (http://steamclocksw.com/prism/) and hit this in v1.0. We assumed that our 18+ rating for being able to browse to NSFW material meant we'd get some leeway, but we were initially rejected for including the "prettygirls" Reddit, which consists of fully clothed photos of adult women.

4chan browsers (chandroid, yon, etc) all include links to NSFW boards in their main list, and those are all available on Google Play. I think they're just being very selective about applying their policy, probably not on purpose either.

Except multiple Reddit clients exist for iOS, and have for years.

And none of them link directly to NSFW reddits.

I guess I don't understand what you mean by "link directly," but NSFW links appear on the Reddit homepage often, and touching them will open the link in the app's browser. Also, (at least in Alien Blue) I can subscribe to any subreddits I want, including NSFW ones.

By "link directly" we mean that a subreddit devoted solely to NSFW content appears as a default in a list of ones to browse from the moment the app is launched.

You've always been free to add specific NSFW subreddits that you know about after the fact. And NSFW links appearing on the frontpage is an occupational hazard, that quite possibly never happened during the App Store review process.

Some of them do show the most popular subreddits (which currently happens to have a naughty subreddit in it), though, as this one does. I think the issue is that the Google person understood the list of popular subreddits to be a developer-specified thing, when in fact it's auto-generated.

From the comments: tapping the top icon from the landing page takes you to a pretty full list of subreddits including NSFW ones

Note that this changed recently: an upgrade was recently pushed through that made this change. The list used to be a list of 10 or so subreddits, but now the list has been expanded to include the top 30-50 or so reddits I think, including all the NSFW ones.

You could get to NSFW subreddits in the older version but had to know the name.

i can make a bookmark to a NSFW site with the browser that's provided in android. how is that not direct linking?

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