I am really very confused by this whole ‘Freedom from Porn” [link] thing that is bouncing around the net. Jobs is telling me that by keeping the iTunes App store free of porn that he is keeping my iPad free from porn.

This is just not true. I have porn movies and images synced to my iPad and iPhone right now. There is a world of porn on the Intertubes. It’s ripe for the picking. Hell, if I’m feeling really literate, I could find myself some public domain porno lit and squirt it through an ePub generating app. Voila! Text smut in iBooks.

What I don’t have are iPhone OS porn apps. And you know what? I really don’t miss them. I sampled a bunch of those apps when they were available in the walled garden. They were tripe. Utter dreck. I did find a couple of date-sim apps that were fun for a run-through, but didn’t hold my interest because they lacked real porn. The rest were just gateways to some porn vendor’s website. “Here’s some samples. Now pay for the full set.” Bah!

Worse than the tease was the quality of the apps. A very small percentage of the apps were written decently or useable for that matter. A lot were fart out of some developers ass as the aftermath of a burrito binge. Because they were dumped into the store as freebies and flooded the market, many of them rose to the top of the charts for no other reason than their download count. What that tells me is that we like porn! Simple.

The push back came in the form of the expulsion of the porn apps from the garden. They were lowering the bar for developers and consumers and providing nothing that couldn’t be delivered via a website. Any web developer worth his or her salt could write a web page for the mobile platform that delivered the same content.

What happens instead? Everyone bitches that Apple is censoring developers and content providers (and there have been legitimate instances [link] & [link]). The blogosphere rippled with indignation. Jobs uttered that he didn’t want porn on the iPhone or iPad.

The statement that he really should have said is that he didn’t want porn in the App Store. Sure it is the only mall in town for iPhone OS apps, but it is his mall after all. Steve gets to decide what he wants to stock the shelves with. I think it reprehensible that there isn’t a way for us to drop apps from other vendors into our Apple branded mobile platforms. When it comes to porn though, the Internet is my oyster.

Addendum: I dropped in on Violet Blue’s site and saw that she was fielding queries regarding this. Here’s my two cents to her.

Okay, here’s the thing that bugs me. One, the Gawker writer admits to having “a Stinger cocktail at [his] side” when he sent his email and the replies and two, well… It was two in the frikkin’ morning! Very few intelligent conversations happen at two AM.

What I don’t get is the big stink. Everyone is blowing this out of proportion. Jobs wants to keep porn out of his store. We have known this for a while. It’s his store (sadly, the only one) and he can stock the shelves how he sees fit. His statement about keeping the device “free from porn” is unsettling, but I think I have shown that there is room for interpretation here.

On the flip-side, the internet is full of porn. The only app needed for that is a browser. Voila! Porn in one palm and yourself in the other. Easy-peasy. Why worry about the availability of porn apps? When there were ‘sexy’ apps in the store, I downloaded several. Most were sub-par and still others were one-trick ponies. I did checkout a couple of dating sims that were fun, but mostly novel and short lived.

There are maybe two types of apps that would be suitable candidates for pursuit. First, sex games: 2+ people playing digital spin the bottle or something like it. It’d be fun, right? Pornographic Scrabble. Strip Boggle. The mind reels at possibilities here. Second, an app that functions as a device controller. With a multi-touch interface, a couple could have a grand time with an iPhone controlled sex toy (just watch out for lube. Apple’s pretty strict about liquid damage).

In the end, we have access to all of the porn out there. Right now, my iPad has 4 adult movies and monster collection of images. Give me public domain pornographic literature and an ePub generator, and I can naughty up iBooks in hot minute. Jobs can rattle his saber, but I have already defeated his intent for the Apple mobile platform.