Dude, where’s my porn apps?
Pretty much everything has an associated app these days. Whether you need food delivered to your house or to have a rant about Ivermectin on Facebook, your first port of call is going to be an app rather than manually tracking something down on Safari or Chrome.
Except, that is, when it comes to porn. Outside of a handful of niche applications for cam performers and their viewers (such as apps for cam-linked sex toys), there quite simply aren’t any porn apps.
Given the huge popularity of porn, you have to ask yourself: what’s with the lack of porn apps? Wouldn’t porn apps, much like any other app, massively streamline and simplify things for viewers?
Let’s take a look at the curious (but largely predictable) case of the missing porn app.
App Marketplaces Are Puritanical
We live in a world where people like to pretend porn (a) doesn’t exist and (b) even if it did, goes unviewed because only perverts watch porn.
This means that the two big app marketplaces most of us use on our smartphones – Google Play and Apple’s App Store – forbid any apps that are sexual in nature from their stores. What does this mean for porn apps?
Even if they existed (and they generally don’t, partly due to this), then they’d have to be made available for download directly from porn sites, rather than from your phone’s native app marketplace.
Apps that are only available in this way are massively less popular than those that can be downloaded from marketplaces, and so will see very limited downloads – probably few enough that they wouldn’t recoup their production costs.
Further to this, apps that are downloaded from websites, rather than an app marketplace, are not officially supported and won’t receive automatic updates. This makes them a massive hassle to download and use, and that’s anathema to our modern-day culture of instant support and gratification.
Porn Viewers Like To Keep It Discreet
How many people reading this make use of porn sites? If the stats on sites like Pornhub and Xvideos are anything to go off: pretty much all of you. Everybody likes a bit of porn, right? Whether they admit it or not.
Next question: how many of you have an account on these sites?
I’m guessing we’d see quite a drop-off in numbers there. Plenty of people consume porn. Not so many people are prepared to register an account that’s tied to their email address (or go through the trouble of making a throwaway email account to make one). You can watch porn either way, so why bother?
Further to this: nobody wants a notification for an email from PornHub popping up on their lock screen. Who knows where you’d be or who’d see it? If you don’t have an account, there’s no danger of that happening.
All of this, of course, applies to apps – except that they’re even more visible. Push notifications could be popping up on your lock screen all the time (it’s very easy to forget to disable them), and if you casually handed your phone over to a friend or partner to, say, order a pizza, it wouldn’t be hard for them to spot an Xvideos app sitting on your home screen.
Bottom line: nobody wants a porn app on their phone. It’s safer and more discreet to simply visit a website and leave no trace on your phone.
Apps Are Expensive To Build And Maintain
Given the above factors, we can see three things:
- Porn apps have an inherently difficult time reaching their audience;
- that they’re harder to maintain and update on smartphones because of the lack of official Apple/Android support;
- Even if the above two were true, people don’t want porn apps on their phones.
With these three things in mind: why on earth would a porn site want to go to the trouble of setting up an app for their site?
Apps don’t come for free. They’re costly to develop, need as much debugging and ongoing maintenance as any other computer program, and need a lot of support to stay updated and working properly – support that’s difficult to render unless users return to the app website regularly to manually check for updates.
All of this, of course, defeats the point of apps in the first place – convenience. If you have to manually search out an app and routinely update it yourself by returning to the website, then using such an app becomes extremely time-consuming and fiddly. Why bother, when you could simply open an incognito tab on Chrome and be on the actual porn site in seconds?
Porn companies realized this a long time ago, and thus haven’t bothered developing their own apps – or if they have, they’ve quickly abandoned them.
After all, why bother spending money on something that is simply going to go unused?
Conclusion
It’s possible that you’re in the tiny fraction of people who actually want to see porn apps more widely available than they are now (e.g. at all), but the fact of the matter is that it’s simply not going to happen.
Porn is both hugely popular and forever a pariah industry that won’t be welcome by mainstream society. This means that everybody wants to consume it, but nobody wants to be seen doing so. Apps are anathema to this since they act as a sort of user history for your entire phone.
And similarly to your browser history, you don’t want anybody cottoning to the fact that you watch porn – or worse still, opening that app and seeing that you’re into Brazilian trans fart-fetish porn. It’s already plenty embarrassing for many people to have somebody see Tinder or Grindr on their phone, let alone porn apps.
For the time being, then (and probably for a long time to come), porn will continue to be a guilty pleasure that’s consigned to an incognito tab.
Which, let’s face it, is probably best for porn companies and you both. No money wasted on apps, and no red-faced fumblings to quickly relock your phone.
