Apple Boots 'Bang with Friends' From App Store After 10 Days

Considering how quickly Apple pulled the deceptively innocent Boyfriend Maker a few months back, it's a little surprising that they let an app called "Bang with Friends" go live in the first place. But it's down now, just a little over a week after its first appearance, presumably because someone at Apple just realized the none-too-subtle meaning behind the name. According to cofounder and CEO Colin Hodge, as reported by Gawker, the salacious app managed to snag over one million users before it was taken down.

It hasn't completely vanished. The website is still up despite a temporary outage earlier, although the App Store section of the site simply states: "Be right back: We're working with Apple to get BWF back into the App Store shortly." There's also text box where you can enter your e-mail address for an update in the event that Apple allows the site to go live again.

At the moment, it's not entirely clear why Apple took the app down after greenlighting it aside from the site's rather obvious intentions. Aside from a fairly explicit logo in the upper left hand corner and a suggestive background image, there's very little that's pornographic about the actual site. The concept, indeed, is simple. You're presented with a gallery of your male or female Facebook friends (your choice), and you press "Down to Bang" under their name if you'd, you know, like to learn how to play drums with them. If they're also using the service and they've selected you, you'll get an e-mail announcing the mutual interest.

Techcrunch suggests that the issue might not be so black-and-white as it initially seems, pointing out that Zynga went after CupidWithFriends because it was using their "With Friends" trademark, not because it was objecting to the content. Yet as CNET reports, Apple's also has a history of removing apps with questionable content, such as one in 2011 that listed DUI checkpoints.

But if you're the kind of person who absolutely needs an app to see if certain things could happen with your friends instead of, you know, asking, you can take heart in the fact that Apple allowed BoyfriendMaker back on the App Store after the developers bumped up the age rating from 4+ to 12+ and cleaned up its act a little. And for what it's worth, Bang with Friends is still available over at Google's no-holds-barred Google Play store.

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