The App Store is officially growing up. Playboy today announced an app for the iPhone. The Playboy App, developed by Jump Games, is available for $1.99.
A press release from Playboy proudly proclaimed: “Steve Jobs has delivered the hardware and now Hugh Hefner has delivered the software.”
The iconic men’s magazine bills the app as “a collection of multimedia features guaranteed to turn up the heat on that cool new phone.” The app features limited monthly content from the magazine, including articles, party jokes, the Playboy Advisor column and various photos of Hugh Heffner posing with celebrities. The app will come with a 17+ rating, and apparently conforms to Apple’s porn policy by cropping pictures of playmates in various poses.
Steve Jobs and company have received some flack over the ambiguous approval criteria for applications submitted to the App Store. Back in May, Apple rejected an e-book reader app, Eucalyptus, because it allowed access to a text-only version of the Kama Sutra via Project Gutenberg.
In late November, Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, addressed the issue. In an interview with Business Week, Shiller said that the process is very much like any retailer that picks and chooses the products that line their shelves.
Schiller said that 90 percent of Apple’s rejections are for technical reasons, such as bugs in the application. He said that only 10 percent of apps are rejected because of inappropriate content.