No nudity in the App Store, says Apple. Them’s the rules. So it’s been hard for an app from the likes of Playboy to make much progress on that front.
Playboy does have an app, mind you, but there’s no nudity. Not that there needs to be nudity! There’s almost nudity, like suggestive photos of near nud—you know what? Let’s move on. This is getting uncomfortable.
So if you’re Playboy and you want to build an app-like experience for the world’s most popular tablet, how do you skirt the rules?
You build it on the web and say it’s optimized for the iPad. That’s what the company has done with its iPlayboy offering. Technically, it’s little more than a website containing every issue of Playboy every published.
The difference is that it looks and behaves very much like an iPad magazine app that you’d download from the iTunes App Store, complete with slick-turning pages and a feature that lets you “rotate your iPad to view a single page or double-page spreads.” A subscription runs $8 per month.
You could ask a somewhat similar question for standard magazine apps: How do you build an app-like experience for the world’s most popular tablet without forking over a 30% commission to Apple? Same answer.
More on TIME.com:
The Basics Behind Apple’s New Subscription Payments System
Google Announces ‘One Pass’ as Publishers Push Against Apple Subscriptions
Steve Jobs: Subscription Terms Only Apply to Publishing Apps