Several blogs — including Queerty and Joe.My.God. — are reporting that Apple has pulled Grindr from the iTunes Store. According to Wikipedia, Grindr was removed from the app store last night at midnight. It’s unclear whether the removal is related to Apple’s recent purge of “adult” apps, and some are already alleging homophobia. If you already have Grindr on your phone, it’s still reportedly working — you just can’t download it. This development comes as Grindr was preparing to celebrate its first anniversary, with parties around the globe between March 23 and 29. One of those parties was set for Station 4 on Friday night.
UPDATE: Looks like this is a false alarm. Queerty is now reporting that the founder of the Grindr app, Joel Simkhai, said it will be available again soon. And sure enough, it’s back in the app store as of 12:48 p.m. Dallas time. Publicity stunt?
5 Comments
I tipped off a few journos including TUAW.com, and I know they’re checking into this.
Apps don’t just “disappear” from the App Store, do they? So who pulled it and why? If it was a PR stunt, that’s a pretty shitty thing to do, and I’ll stop using Grindr.
I can confirm that here (Sao Paulo, Brazil) it first registered as “The item you are trying to purchase is no longer available” at around midnight Pacific Time and then vanished shortly thereafter from the App Store. As of now (12:15pm PT) it is still missing. Curiously, this news was added to Grindr’s Wikipedia page history shows an edit: ” * (cur) (prev) 07:38, 23 March 2010 Backpack (talk | contribs) (3,983 bytes) (?History) (undo) ” (I’m not sure what time zone that represents) in which the following phrase was added: “On March 23, 2010, at approximately midnight pacific time, the Grindr app and its references were removed from the app store.”
By the way, I think it’s great that the screen capture above says “No Service,” because that’s what I get almost every time I use Grindr (or anything else, for that matter).
There was delicious irony when I went to a Grindr party a few weeks ago at TOWN Danceboutique in Washington, D.C., at which there was absolutely no AT&T reception of any kind whatsoever. Of course, if I were the promoter, I would have ensured that there was wifi. Duh.
Apple has always been EXTREMELY propriotory.
Main reason why I boycott Apple. Very un-user-friendly.
You can only play certain files, you HAVE to use our format, you must use only AT&T, only use “approved” applications.
Matt – there’s a map for that.
meg, i beg to differ with your assessment of apple. they are actually VERY user friendly. i gave my 60 something year old mother an apple computer and she, with no prior computing experience, took to it like a duck to water. you can play almost any file on a mac (i’m assuming you are talking audio or video) without installing any new software and if you find something that won’t play you can usually find something that will work without too much searching, you don’t have to use their format, you can jailbreak an iphone to work on t-mobile. yes, on an unjailbroken iphone you can only use approved apps. but that’s like saying tom thumb requires you to use approved produce. it’s their store, they can sell what they want.
now, i will say apple is very strange in their app store approval process. i don’t like the fact that for official use you have to use at&t (the single worst network in the industry). that will change in time, i suspect but it’s really no different than many other carriers that have exclusive contracts with a single carrier at the launch of their new product.
oh, and also, it’s proprietary. if you had an iphone you could look up how to spell it in the dictionary, because, there is an app for that.