Mark Bergen has an interesting (albeit weak, so no link) piece over at Re/Code today about how the x-rated market might be an advantage for Android against iOS. His substance was light, but his premise is interesting.
Pornography has long played an important role in the shaping of the technology roadmap. It’s why VHS beat BetaMax and Blu-Ray won over HD-DVD (Disney helped that last one quite a bit too.) It’s how chat rooms became popular and why virtual reality has been pursued in many fashions. Pornography has long been an early adopter to technologies that bring a profit that can sustain early tech long enough for the adoption curve to catch up.
And yet, Apple has seen tremendous success without embracing it and, in many not so subtle ways, outright rejecting it.
To be fair, when I first got my iPhone back in 2007 and marveled at it’s ability to show “the real web” from a phone, more than one friend’s first question was “can you visit porn sites on it?” To which the answer was, of course, yes. And while unspoken, we all know (as events such as “The Fappening” have proved) that Apple’s servers are housing a tremendous amount of homemade adult content. Make no mistake, the iPhone has done much to advance pornography; especially of the amateur variety.
Yet, officially, Apple rejects the genre completely. Adult-themed apps are under constant scrutiny and often pulled from the store. Even the adult magazine of record, Playboy, cannot make an appearance in the Newsstand (although their latest app got by “just for the articles.”)
Throughout the modern history of tech, many if not most big advancements have found their early success when they have been able to advance mankind’s insatiable demand for pornography. But not the iPhone. Not iOS.
It’s another instance (along with such notables as “closed vs open” and “market share”) where Apple’s success seems to defy the odds.
Only Apple.
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