Tim Sweeney on the Apps With Porn in Apple’s App Store

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, on X:

Apple is being extremely disingenuous in attacking the European Union here. The iOS App Store hosts the Reddit app, which provides access to massive amounts of porn. Apple knows this, permits it, and gave Reddit a 17+ (!!!) rating and Editors Choice award. [...]

As a recently deleted (by who?) post on the r/iOS subreddit explains, Apple’s iOS App Store welcomes apps that host tons of porn, as Reddit does, as long as the majority of the content isn’t porn, and the app has controls to hide the porn.

Sweeney has a real point here, and it really is a bit of a conundrum. I’m not sure what he’s alluding to with the “by who?” parenthetical, but I don’t think one deleted Reddit thread on the topic was the result of Apple dispatching some Men in Black agents to knock on Reddit’s door. Reddit is full of non-deleted threads from people asking variations of the same question. And the press has been covering the saga for a decade.

But how is it possible that these super popular platforms have apps in the no-porn App Store while hosting tons of porn? It’s an issue with Reddit, with Tumblr, and apparently especially so with X (fka Twitter). (I’m not trying to feign prudishness here, but I’ve heard, several times, that you really don’t want to go looking for NSFW content on X because what you’ll find is ... something.)

I think Sweeney’s synopsis captures Apple’s de facto policy accurately, with the exception that they don’t welcome apps that host porn (so long as the app has controls to hide it, and if the adult content is effectively a side hustle in the overall context of the app), but tolerate it. It’s a de facto policy of tolerating unadvertised pornographic content on platforms that are too big to ban from the App Store without generating far more of an outcry than any controversy over the side-hustle porn will.

Some banks are too big to fail. Some platforms are too big to ban. Apple won’t say that, but that’s clearly the tacit policy. It’s not confusing that the exceptions are super popular apps — they are exceptions because they’re super popular. And it’s absolutely not a policy of looking the other way — Apple’s policing of the situation is an enormous never-ending pain in the ass for the platforms involved.

★ Tuesday, 4 February 2025