What do President Obama, Jesus and vaginas all have in common? Before you can come back at us with a clever yet defamatory answer, they've all been banned from the App Store by Apple. They're not alone either. With well over a million iOS apps now doing the rounds, there have been hundreds of controversial and questionable apps over the years.
For one reason or another, these are the ones that have stood out the most.
1| La Petite Mort
If there's one thing that Apple's not keen on, it's sex, which is probably why this app was killed off quickly. Translated as "the sensation of orgasm as likened to death," La Petite Mort involved little more than touching your iPad's screen in order to stimulate a heavily pixelated vagina. No points system, no level-ups, just some abstract sounds of pleasure when you poked properly.
2| Sweatshop HD
This app had good intentions but seriously questionable applications. Designed to make users question perceptions of clothing production, the iPad-based game put you at the head of a sweatshop and forced you into making cost-cutting decisions such as employing underage workers and increasing hours. Still available online as a free Flash game, Sweatshop HD was played more than a million times before eventually being pulled by Apple.
3| Obama Trampoline
Sticking the world's most powerful man on a trampoline sounds more like a great stress-relieving exercise than an app that's going to get its developers a slapped wrist, but that's exactly what happened to Obama Trampoline. Deemed to have "ridiculed public figures", it was rejected by Apple, forcing POTUS to get his exercise another way.
4| I Am Rich
A thousand dollars for an app? Jog on. That's how much the obnoxiously titled I Am Rich app cost, though, with the functionless app being pulled just a day after launching back in 2008. Described as "a work of art with no hidden function at all," it simply displayed a glowing red gem graphic that was the ultimate beacon of money-wasting dickheads. Amazingly, eight grade-A fools actually bought the £599.99 app before it was unceremoniously cut from the App Store for ripping people off.
5| I Am Poor
Can't afford a near-£600 app? No, neither can we. We could afford the 99p I Am Poor app, or at least we could have had Apple not banned it before it even hit the store. Rejected due to the fact that it offered "no user functionality," it displayed ramen noodles, tuna and a healthy slice of mac & cheese instead of the I Am Rich red jewel.
6| Sexy Bikini Fart
"Fart" and "sexy" aren't two words you'd traditionally expect to go together. Throw bikinis into the mix, however, and you've got the perfect recipe for a soon-to-be-culled app. Offering titillation and childish humour in equal measure, this app showed pictures of scantily clad models and overdubbed them with a mixture of moans of pleasure and great big trumps. Clearly Apple didn't feel that flatulence fetishists deserved a dedicated app.
7| Phone Story
"Hey Apple, you bastards, we hate you! Wait, can we please launch our app slagging you off?" Not the best business pitch, admittedly, but the one adopted by the makers of Phone Story, an app that looked to highlight "the dark side of your favourite smartphone". From African slaves mining raw materials to Chinese workers jumping to their deaths at a phone factory, via the effects of e-waste in Pakistan, it was unsurprisingly pulled hours after launching.
8| Baby Shaker
How this was ever approved in the first place is beyond us, but 'Baby Shaker' actually made its way into the App Store back in 2009 before causing widespread outrage and being hastily pulled. The idea of an app was to shake your phone to quieten a crying baby, with a "successful" shake causing two red Xs to appear over the baby's eyes. Shame on whoever's idea this was.
9| Me So Holy
"You know what people will be totally OK with? An app that lets you stick your face on visual representations of a number Gods and religious figures. Yeah, everyone's going to love that." We can see how that developer meeting went as two bros chuckled their way through offending half the planet's population in one fell swoop. Deemed to have contained "Objectionable content" (shocker), the app which let you turn yourself into Jesus was wisely canned.
10| Manhattan Declaration App
From anti-religion to small-minded religion. The Manhattan Declaration app saw religious fanatics spread messages of anti-abortion and gay-bashing. Once pulled, a petition to have it reinstated received almost half a million signatures, but, thankfully, Apple held firm and it remains banished to the small-minded mound of banned apps.
11| System And Security Info
While some of the above are daft and others simply ridiculous, this app was reportedly banned for suggesting that Apple isn't the omnipotent power it would like you to think. The app, which could tell if users' phones were infected with malware or had been secretly jailbroken, was said to provide "potentially inaccurate and misleading diagnostic functionality for iOS devices." In other words, "Stop making us look bad."
