While Steve Jobs has clearly expressed his distaste for Android by saying “Folks who want porn can buy an [sic] Android phone.”, the iPhone is in no way in short supply of pornographic material, even after they pulled 5000 apps from the App Store.
Although Jobs makes a good argument about the availability of porn on Android devices, there’s still a wealth of the material still accessible on the iPhone. Recently, a group called Parents Television Council has cataloged a list of available iPhone porn applications.”Some of these applications are free to children and adults; and links to websites that lead to even more explicit pornography are also given on iTunes,” says the organization, “And even if teens do not purchase or download these apps, Apple provides samples of the pornography on iTunes for all to see.”
Android may have some pornographic material on the Android Market, but most are paid applications. This doesn’t make it any more appropriate, but chances are that the kids looking for these apps don’t have a credit card at their disposal. Android also has a porn application store, Mikandi, that users can download outside of the Market.
Parents, you don’t have to worry about your kid getting access to this app store if you’ve recently got them the Motorola Backflip, as they do not have the ability to download any applications outside of the Android Market.
If Apple had their way, they would limit the websites you could access with their products. Who knows, maybe they will in the future (we hope not). Since the launch of the iPad, there have been a handful of pornographic websites that have optimized their site to make videos viewable on the device, and that’s not going to stop. For the most part, even Android hasn’t had to do much, since the iPhone optimized porn sites work just fine on these devices as well.
Even if Apple does successfully pull every porn application from the App Store, there’s always going to be a way to get it onto the device. It’s all in where you look for it. Sure, banning Flash is a step for Apple to make sure that most porn sites will be incompatible with their products, but many have also moved to HTML5 so that it will be available to the user who wants it.
I understand the concern of parent’s today not wanting their kids to watch said material, but guess what? They will find a way. Kids growing up in this day and age know technology much better than many parents. As far as you know, you’re kid watches it all the time, and clears the web history, cookies, and whatnot, and for the most part, the parents wouldn’t even know that’s possible. I’m not calling those parents stupid, but the fact that children today have grown up with technology their entire lives helps them know all the ins and outs of what they want to do – and how to cover it up if they need to.
With that said, something does need to be done with porn available for both iPhone, and Android. But you best be certain that there will always be a way to get access to these things.