Steve Jobs: Want porn? Buy an Android

Apple's authorial filter on the App Store is hazy at best, with the dominant smartphone designer still deciding what's suitable for the device and app creators still testing the boundaries of Apple's censorship.

Take Mark Fiore, a Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist whose app was banned in December of 2009 because it, "contains content that ridicules public figures."

After Fiore revealed that the application was rejected this April, and technology pundits championed it as another example of Apple's walled-garden App Store, Apple bent to the the bad publicity and asked the cartoonist to resubmit the app.

In an email reply to customer Matthew Browing, who accused Apple of being "moral police", Apple CEO Steve Jobs explained that "Fiore’s app will be in the store shortly" and admitted that the rejection was a "mistake."

But one decision that Jobs intends to honour is the ban on pornographic material. His email response to Browing continues: "However, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone."

So where should you go to get naked people on mobile phones? The Android. "Folks who want porn can buy and [sic] Android phone," says Jobs.

The message echoes an answer Steve Jobs gave to a similar question at the iPhone OS 4.0 debut.

He pointed out that Google's far more lenient content restrictions means the Android marketplace has adult content, or as Jobs put it: "You know, there’s a porn store for Android. You can download nothing but porn."

"That’s a place we don’t want to go," Jobs said "so we’re not going to go there."