Apple purges thousands of 'sexy' apps from App Store

Apple has embarked on a massive clean up of the App Store and removed thousands of 'sexy' games and apps over the past week.

Over 5,000 apps were summarily axed over the weekend, according to the App monitor Appshopper.com. That constitutes about 3% of the App Store's total.

Philip Schiller, Apple's head of global marketing, told the New York Times that the crackdown followed a recent trend where a small number of developers submitted 'an increasing number of apps containing very objectionable content.'

'It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see,' Schiller told the NYT.

Among the 'objectionable' apps booted out of the App Store were the smutty but not pornographic 'Wobble iBoobs' (think of an interactive Carry On game) which had already managed nearly a million downloads. Most of the other apps banned contain similar content - usually featuring scantily clad women.

But Apple has laid itself open to charges of hypocrisy - or at the very least favouritism - by allowing publishers such as Sports Illustrated and Playboy to continue to sell similar apps with women have difficulty retaining their clothing.

Schiller's response was that companies like Sports Illustrated were different from smaller developers. "this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format," he said.

For an example of what Schiller and Steve Jobs feel is unacceptable check out the video of the Wobble iBoobs app below...