YNOT – OK, mobile adult application developers, here’s your chance. If you’ve fumed about Apple’s censors vis-à-vis the iTunes App Store or Google’s new Android marketplace, an independent online outlet now exists that will allow you to sell your porn apps your way.MiKandi.com launched right before Thanksgiving. According to the homepage, “We just launched our portal and mobile client for Android devices, with other devices coming soon…. What we do for the developer is simple. We provide a way to market, monetize and deliver adult apps to users that you wouldn’t have access to in your traditional channels.
“From the moment you stock an app, we provide you an easy-to-use online account where you can upload multiple apps, add detailed descriptions, screenshots and videos showing off your app. You can have a discussion with your users, or they can review your app on your profile.”
Apps also show up in the MiKandi App Store, a mobile client for discovery and download of adult apps. The MiKandi mobile catalog is capable of incorporating YouTube-style videos of the app in action.
“We do not place heavy restrictions or try to censor your apps,” the MiKandi folks note. “Our job is to make sure you have all the tools you’ll need for success. As long as it’s legal, the sky’ the limit.”
MiKandi also provides a way to protect content distributed via its store. KandiSafe is a simple “forward-lock” mechanism that uses network access to verify user rights. An easy-to-follow, step-by-step tutorial on the website walks developers through implementation.
When developers are ready to cash out their earnings, they can choose to receive their funds via Amazon Payments or PayPal.
MiKandi is only the first in what many observers expect to be a flood of specialized app stores to pop up on the Web, not only for porn, but also potentially for any other field of interest imaginable. Google’s Android operating system, unlike Apple’s iPhone OS or Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, is open-source. Reportedly it’s also lightweight, quite stable and almost infinitely expandable. Those qualities make the OS attractive not only to developers, but also to consumers. Already the OS underlies not only Verizon’s hot new Droid phone (probably the closest thing yet to an “iPhone killer”), but also T-Mobile’s MyTouch 3G, Sprint’s Samsung Moment and AT&T’s HTC Pure.
“The prospects for expanding into diversified markets on Android are larger than on any other mobile platform available today, because ‘censoring’ or rigorous and controlled app approval processes tied to a single vendor — such as those that exist on the iPhone — do not exist on the Android platform. And they probably never will,” ZDNet’s Jason Perlow wrote on his Tech Broiler blog. “…[B]ecause Android is an open system and allows the ability for 3rd-party app installation … there’s nothing to stop premium adult content providers, such as Playboy, Penthouse and Vivid, from working with companies like MiKandi to provide quality produced erotica for mobile.
“It’s also entirely possible that these companies and others could also license Mikandi’s platform (or someone else’s) to launch app stores of their own so they can control the quality or flavor of what they produce,” Perlow added. “I can certainly see the emergence of gay- and lesbian-oriented app stores, or even fetish-specialized, which are targeted towards specific audiences and tastes. The freedoms of choice with Android would be unlimited.”
