'Adult' iPhone app causes a stir

The first sexually explicit iPhone application went on sale at Apple's iTunes App Store on Thursday, only to be withdrawn a few hours later.

The Hottest Girls application was available for US$1.99, offering users random pictures of women, including some featuring nudity.

The application was the first to offer explicit content for the iPhone 3.0 operating system. Apple opened the door for such content when it included age verification and parental control features in the latest update of the software.

According to developer Allen Leung, the application had been available without nudity since May and had risen into the top 10 most popular lifestyle applications on the store.

Within hours of its launch, the application was pulled from the App Store, causing some to speculate that Apple had changed its mind on allowing explicit content. Leung said on his web site, however, that the takedown was by his own request.

Shortly after the nude photograph feature went live, downloads of the application skyrocketed. The resulting surge in traffic was enough to take down the server that distributed the photos, forcing Leung to request that the app be temporarily removed from the store until the problem could be solved.

Explicit content is but a small portion of the new software that Apple hopes to add to the App Store with its latest software update.

The company included a number of APIs in the update that will allow developers to access such components as the data push feature and iPod library. Additionally, the company boosted the performance of its latest iPhone 3GS model, adding a faster processor and more RAM.

As a result, both Apple and iPhone developers expect the coming months to see the emergence of a new class of applications that make better use of all the iphone's hardware components.