Apple's Parental Controls for iPhone and iPod Touch Confirmed, Opportunity for Mobile Manga

One of the biggest points of contention which has had the spotlight for much of this week is the seemingly arbitrary way in which Apple would reject applications and content on the basis of containing offensive or explicit content.

The situation came to a head when musician Trent Reznor had an update to his NIN: Access application initially rejected this week for containing access to the track The Downward Spiral, while iTunes itself sold the album uncensored.

After the requisite hellraising and exposure of the approval process as arbitrary, the application update was recently approved and left intact with no censorship.

Now comes confirmation that Apple has indeed built-in full parental controls for applications and content for the forthcoming release of the latest iPhone OS expected in June along with new hardware.

This will be a boon for adult manga publishers and those with adult-oriented applications as those can be age restricted without needing to sanitize content or face rejection from Apple while opening up another revenue stream, with the approval process expected to be adjusted for the new controls.

Heads up to related blogs: The non-iPhone devices are called the iPod Touch, not the iTouch or any derivative thereof. Apparently, none of you got Apple’s press memo that explicitly states the correct name for the device and yes, they do pay attention to such things.