Apple's Problem with Bodies

Apple's Problem with Bodies

Building for iOS sometimes feels like archaeology: brush away enough guidelines and you hit something older and stranger. A system that can classify violence with forensic precision still can't decide if the human body is health, lifestyle, or sin.

One day I tried to ship a private intimacy tracker–nothing scandalous, just a journal for wellbeing–and App Store Connect assigned it the 16+ rating it uses for gambling apps and "unrestricted web access". The rating itself is fine: the target audience is well past that age anyway. What baffles me is the logic.

Silk–the app I’m talking about, almost reluctantly–is a wellbeing journal in the most boring sense possible. You choose a few words about your day, moods, closeness, symptoms, or whatever else matters to you and your partner(s). It lives entirely on-device, syncs with nothing and phones no one. The whole point is that nothing interesting happens to your data after you close the app.

And yet, from the App Store’s point of view, you can build a game with guns and cartoon violence and happily ship it to kids, while tracking your own body needs a 16+ “mature themes” label.

Welcome to the grey zone.

A Category With No Name ¶

If you were around for the early App Store, you’ll remember its optimism: accelerometer-driven beer glasses, wobbling jelly icons, flashlight apps that set brightness to 100% because no one had ever considered the idea before. The ecosystem assumed “content” meant pictures, sound, or the occasional cow-milking simulator–not a user quietly describing part of their life to themselves.

The App Store still carries the outline of that first life. Its vocabulary came from iTunes, which came from film ratings, built for a world where "content" meant something you could point a camera at. When the App Store arrived in 2008, it reused that system because it was available–and because no one expected apps to do much beyond wobbling or making noise.

Those assumptions didn’t last. By 2009 the Store had hosted an infamous $999 app that did nothing but display a red gem, a game where you shook a crying baby until it died, and enough fart apps that one reportedly earned five figures daily . The review process was learning in public.

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