Update: Comixology revealed that it had in fact self-censored and Apple put it right. I write about this in a new post that also talks about how Apple’s silence regarding the press isn’t helping matters these days.

Issue 12 of mature comic Saga has been banned by Apple. It will not be for sale in Comixology’s iOS app, and will have to be purchased elsewhere. This is a minor inconvenience (not least given Comixology’s lack of on-device subscriptions), but the decision’s already being slammed as another example of overt Apple censorship, and some kind of proof that Apple will destroy the comics industry.

Rarely for me, I’m not sure what to think about this. Although I have the first trade of Saga, I’d not read the current issue on hearing about the story. To that end, I wasn’t sure exactly what Apple had a problem with, bar various websites reporting on “explicit gay sex”, and co-creator Brian K. Vaughan countering that this was actually “two postage stamp-sized images of gay sex”. Vaughan added:

This is a drag, especially because our book has featured what I would consider much more graphic imagery in the past, but there you go. Fiona and I could always edit the images in question, but everything we put into the book is there to advance our story, not (just) to shock or titillate, so we’re not changing s**t.

Vaughan also pointed out:

If all else fails, you might be able to find SAGA #12 in Apple’s iBookstore, which apparently sometimes allows more adult material to be sold than through its apps. Crazy, right?

Sort of. Although that does look like hypocrisy, and Apple does need to figure out a way to enable adult/mature content in the App Store, Tap! deputy editor Matthew Bolton pointed out the following on Twitter:

Apple declines to directly sell comic showing three penises ejaculating on someone’s face in a store currently being criticised for making it too easy for kids to buy anything. It continues to have no problem with you buying this content another way. Can’t feel outraged, sorry.

And this is the problem. People are outraged about issues relating to children using IAP and having access to content they shouldn’t via the App Store. Then they’re outraged by Apple performing any censorship on the App Store. Apple can’t really win. (And, no, multiple accounts wouldn’t be the solution, unless you really believe we wouldn’t then see a slew of the exact same stories but from parents who’d ‘forgotten’ to switch accounts before giving their iOS device to a child.)

The (not safe for work) preview of Saga 12 on CBR shows what all the fuss was about, involving two frames of gay sex on a robot character’s TV head. It’s really a bit ‘blink and you’ll miss it’, and having now seen it, I’d say Vaughan definitely has a point; in earlier episodes I’ve read (that are still available via the iOS Comixology app), depictions of sex were certainly a lot more obvious—although Apple might argue you never saw ejaculate. Others might then point out plenty of comics ‘approved’ by Apple show countless people getting blown to pieces in a shower of blood, and so banning a couple of tiny frames of man-on-man action (or men-on-man in the second) in an age-rated adult comic (17+) seems on the crazy side. (But, again, would a parental lock make any odds? People assume comics are for kids, and so I can imagine the Daily Mail screeching: “Horror as child sees penis in children’s comic on Apple iPad set to children’s account, WHY WON’T ANYONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?”)

So I’m more confused about this than anything and not really outraged, other than being outraged about not knowing what to be outraged about.

I hate you, Apple.

UPDATE: As Alex Hern notes on Twitter:

My big problem with it is the homophobic element. If Apple treated gay and straight sex the same, they’d just be prudish.

He links to another Saga (NSFW) image that’s, if anything, more explicit than the banned ones, and I now think Apple got this one wrong. This all rather smacks of Apple’s “we’ll know it when we see it” attitude to what’s allowed and what isn’t, but any suggestion of homophobia is hugely disappointing and also quite strange coming from a company that has strongly supported gay rights. That all said, perhaps if this were all pointed out to Apple, it’d just remove the issue including that second linked frame too.

Twitter user ‘superluminescence’ counters:

Apple’s policy seems pretty clearly equivalent to “what would get on TV”. Those images aren’t exactly grey area.

To some extent, that’s true, but then the image Hern linked to also wouldn’t be acceptable on television.

BOOM! For Windows IT Pro, Paul Thurrott tells it like it is, apart from the fact he doesn’t. In reality, he thinks he does, but instead fires out a whining IT’S SO UNFAIR defence of previous knee-jerk reactionism regarding his original thoughts surrounding Apple’s iPad.

Apple fan boys with fragile egos and long memories like to taunt me with some of my early quotes about the iPad—I referred to it as an “iDud” when it was announced in January 2010, for example—without respecting the fact that my writings about the devices got a lot more positive when I started using them.

Translation: I had an on-automatic, biased reaction to something I’d not even used, and now rather than say “yeah, I probably shouldn’t have done that,” I will instead brand those reminding me of this ‘fan boys’ with ‘fragile egos’. For the record, I’ve done the former, but I try hard to not do the latter. As an ex-MacUser hack reminded me, I slammed the original iPod. I also once dismissed the iPhone as a gaming platform. In both cases, I’d not when writing used the items enough, and my thoughts on them changed dramatically on doing so. Thurrott’s almost the same:

I guess it still confuses people on that partisan side of the world to realize that more experience with something can actually alter your opinion.

He’s right on experience providing the means for opinions to change, but I don’t think that really confuses anyone. What’s confusing is when you blame people for bringing up the fact you shouldn’t really have dismissed something with a smug quip without having experienced it. I’ll take my lumps on both the iPod and the iPhone. What I won’t do is brand someone a fan boy or say they’ve a fragile ego for pulling me up on writing the kind of crap that I absolutely shouldn’t be writing.

After quite a lot of “Windows got there first with tablets” and “the original iPad had lots of problems anyway,” he nonetheless concludes:

Sometimes first impressions really are wrong.

It’s a pity he didn’t also conclude that people bringing up poor writing churned out in the past aren’t necessarily fan-boys with fragile egos, but people pissed off that tech journos—and especially those with influence—too often form an opinion before experiencing what they’re writing about.

Fine. I’ve had enough. The bleating of idiot journos has beaten me down, the last straw being the WSJ piece on how Apple has to act more like Samsung if it wants to thrive. If we ignore profits, design, innovation, usability, clarity of purchase experience, and the app ecosystem, it’s pretty clear Apple is doomed. Therefore, here’s what it should do, in order to ‘thrive’:

• Fire the entire executive team and replace them with celebrities. Jony Ive’s essentially been doing the exact same thing for years now anyway and is just phoning it in. Therefore, why not add a little celeb pizazz from someone literally phoning it in? WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
• Instead of concentrating on one new model of iPhone, Apple should set fire to focus and embrace a Samsung-like mentality often referred to as “throwing crap at the wall and seeing what sticks”. If Tim Cook’s celeb successor isn’t on stage this summer revealing at least 160 new iPhones, each slightly different from the others, Apple will have clearly failed and won’t thrive. Usefully, consumers will then have real choice, between dozens of different iPhones that are barely possible to tell apart. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
• Apple’s long concentrated on carefully managing its market share growth, ensuring it makes profits. Price changes haven’t been reactionary, but looking at the long game. It’s pretty clear Apple’s got this wrong. This summer, Apple should announce a price-cut of at least 97 per cent across its entire range. The company could then use catchy slogans such as “iPhone: it’s now so cheap that even the WSJ can’t bitch about that”, although this would obliterate Apple’s profits in the process. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
• One of Apple’s biggest mistakes has been in not jumping on every possible tech bandwagon, churning out some new hardware and then rapidly abandoning it. The next keynote should be positively chock-full of new kit: an Apple television, some Apple glasses, an Apple watch, an Apple car, an Apple fridge, an Apple apple (edible tech that has an embedded version of Siri that makes helpful utterances such as “You have mail,” and “Rain is forecast this afternoon,” and “OH GOD PLEASE DON’T EAT ME I DON’T WANT TO DIE!”), because, well, WHAT COULD POSSIBLY ETC.

I think we can all agree that this would make for a fantastic new Apple that wouldn’t at all be a total disaster and would thrive!

Most people use iTunes (on a Mac or PC) or the App Store app (on iOS) to look for apps. However, I’ve long used iTunes Preview in the browser to grab information for the many app and game reviews I write. This is simply a speed thing—iTunes remains slothful and you can’t easily copy information from it; by contrast, grabbing information from the browser is child’s play.

Typically, the quick way to get to such pages was to type ‘iTunes [app name]’ into Google. With rare exceptions, the app would be the first result. A couple of months ago, this began to change. I noticed iTunes Preview pages sliding down the rankings or vanishing entirely. On March 19, I said the following on Twitter:

Searches in Google for “[App name] iTunes” (to access the iTunes Preview page) are often rarely #1 these days. In Bing, they usually are. I’ve noticed a big slide re those results in recent months. Must be algorithmic, unless Google’s now specifically penalising iTunes Preview.

During the rest of March, things got much, much worse, to the point I subsequently switched to Bing as my default search engine while working on the latest issue of Tap! magazine, on the basis Google was driving me nuts and wasting my time with its inexplicable wrecking of iTunes Preview rankings. Last week on Twitter, I called the changes “irritating” and “also deeply suspicious”. Although I wanted to give Google the benefit of the doubt, the fact remains it’s in a major mobile war with Apple and so hampering its competitor is beneficial from a business standpoint; and even if the change is purely based on adjustments to Google’s algorithm, the knock-on effect remains the same.

Yesterday, TechCrunch, The Next Web and The Verge all discovered what I’d noticed myself weeks ago, although TechCrunch then provided the inaccurate advice that adding the ‘iTunes’ keyword to a search query

appears to be necessary in order to see the iTunes URL returned to the top spot, which has long been a trick savvy Google users know to use to get the results ranked higher.

In fact, this does little. Adding ‘iTunes’, ‘App Store’ or ‘iTunes Preview’ results in little if any changes to the majority of searches; elsewhere, I’ve noticed when iTunes Preview is highly ranked, it’s often via an affiliate code (for example, games searches often have IGN’s affiliate URL near the top of the heap).

Google recently gave the BBC a slap for “unnatural links” and has now told The Verge:

We’ve been having some issues fetching pages from the iTunes web servers, and as a result some people may have had problems finding iTunes apps in search easily. We’re working with the team there to ensure search users can find what they’re looking for.

I do hope this is the case, and that Google acts and fixes the problem promptly, because it’s supposed to be a search engine, not a manually curated set of links that mostly benefits Google. Still, with the results lists getting wrecked by sign-in preferences, Google+, advertising and other factors, part of me’s surprised Google’s responded at all. I also have that nagging feeling about this being a screw-up; it reminds me of when Google got caught short bypassing Safari security settings.

In the meantime, you’ve three options to get iTunes searches back:

1. Change your default search engine to something other than Google.
2. Use a launcher like Alfred that enables you to do ad-hoc searches in a non-default search engine. (For example, I have reverted my default search engine to Google, but use Alfred and ‘bing [app name]’ for iTunes Preview and some other searches.)
3. Use ‘site:itunes.apple.com’ before your search term in Google, which will usually return the app at or near the number-one spot.

Kevin Lynch CTO is joining Apple, and will report to Bob Mansfield as VP of technology. Before his stint at Adobe, Lynch was a major force at Macromedia (much like Apple SVP Phil Schiller, originally Macromedia’s VP of product marketing), working on software and product development. According to John Gruber at Daring Fireball (in claws out ‘meow’ mode), though, Lynch is a “bozo, a bad hire“. As if that wasn’t enough, Gruber then follows up with a second rowr, stating:

I get that the guy worked for Adobe and had to play for the home team, but as CTO he backed a dying technology for years too long. In 2007 when the iPhone shipped Flash-free, that was one thing. But for Adobe to still be backing the Flash horse in 2010 when the iPad came out — they just looked silly.

You play the cards you have. Adobe’s hand at the time wasn’t great, and it included lots of cards that said “Flash” in massive letters. That Adobe initially banked on Flash made sense, on the basis that while it wasn’t obviously suited for mobile, it did play into the ‘works everywhere’ ethos that underpinned the web. The company was presumably hoping Apple’s lead could be clawed back by Flash-armed competitors, and that Flash itself could improve rapidly on mobile. That obviously didn’t happen.

In 2010, Adobe was still banging the Flash drum, but again you play the cards you hold. Around that time, judging by subsequent releases of its software, Flash’s pivot must have been very much in progress by that point, with Adobe planning to reposition the product as a tool for app development and high-end online multimedia experiences, rather than it continuing as a ‘default’ component of the web. I imagine around the same time, Adobe’s Edge suite (several small apps for working with web standards) must have also been in the planning stages. But software and products do not happen overnight, and so you play your hand until you have something that competes in a specific sector, in largely the same way Apple dismissed small tablets until the second it unveiled the iPad mini.

Lynch wasn’t just an employee pushing the company line. As CTO, he was the guy who defined the company line — and his line had Adobe still pushing for Flash on mobile devices over three years after the iPhone shipped.

As CTO, he was presumably also the guy who defined the company’s rather rapid shift towards web standards, who at the very least okayed the savvy purchase of Typekit, and who, as noted, managed against the odds to keep Flash relevant, albeit to a smaller market.

That’s not to say I’m some kind of pro-Adobe drone. Edge remains flawed, some Adobe products are bloated, and the company’s repeated fumbling of Fireworks as a UI design tool is both baffling and depressing. (Top hint if you’re on OS X—use Sketch instead.) But branding Lynch a “bozo” purely on the basis of his advocacy for his company’s core technology—even after that technology had passed its best—makes little sense; what Lynch did doesn’t strike me as a bozo move, merely one rooted in reality while changes were made behind the scenes. As Ian Betteridge (who’s actually met Lynch) eloquently put it on Twitter earlier:

“That big product we make a lot of money from? Dead.” No exec, ever.