As has become customary for such events, Apple is prepping a giveaway for whoever downloads the milestone app — in this case, a $10,000 gift card to the App Store. The next 50 customers will get a $500 App Store gift card.

Cheapskates (and Android users) can even enter without downloading an app by going here.

Apps, meanwhile, have become big business for Apple and Google, generating billions in revenue. Software sales, meanwhile, have helped transform iTunes from a near-break-even business to a significant profit generator.

Apple has also paid out more than $9 billion to app developers, up from more than $7 billion as of January.

And app downloads continue at a torrid pace, with Apple having reported in October 2012 that it had just crossed 35 billion downloads.

So, it’s at once refreshing and puzzling to see something so trend-buckingly different as the zSpace, a 3-D monitor developed by a “virtual-holographic computing” company of the same name in Sunnyvale, Calif.

ZSpace execs said the monitor is mainly intended for non-gaming uses, but at both the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last month and at zCon — a company-run conference in Mountain View, Calif., this week — the potential for games was on prominent display. The problem is that this (admittedly cool) new hardware is very, very expensive right now: You can pick up a monitor, stylus controller and 3-D glasses for a cool $3,995 online.

Here’s how it works: Those 3-D glasses have five passive markers that signal four cameras in the 24-inch LCD monitor. By moving one’s head in any direction, the picture on the screen adjusts, as if the objects displayed within it occupied real, three-dimensional space.

Then, using a wired stylus with three physical buttons, users see a straight (virtual) line connecting the object in their hand to a mouse-like dot onscreen. To use a simple example, a cube on the screen can be looked at from multiple angles using just the glasses, then picked up, brought closer or moved farther away, rotated or moved somewhere else using the stylus.

The video below shows the first part of that equation, as I pushed my phone camera up against the glasses lens and then moved the glasses back and forth in front of the monitor, traveling around a 3-D diagram of a heart.

At its high price point, the zSpace is currently best suited for enterprise and educational customers seeking to, for instance, visualize data in three dimensions or (as in the video above) virtually study the structure of real-world objects.

However, the company pointedly brought in a handful of video game professionals for its conference to get developers thinking about games on the monitor. Indeed, the most impressive demo on display at zCon — also found at GDC — was of the game engine Unity running its demo game AngryBots in 3-D. Using the stylus to move a soldier and shoot from a top-down view, players could physically duck down to help their soldier “see” through a window.

At its conference, zSpace seemed confident enough in its future that it didn’t require its speakers to be cheerleaders for the technology. On Monday, virtual reality expert David Nahon of Dassault Systems pointed out that plenty of others’ stabs at VR in the past have failed despite cool hardware.

“If you don’t have content, you can have the best container, and it’s going to fail,” Nahon said, adding that zSpace currently lacks a “killer purpose” like Wacom’s Cintiq drawing tablets, which are aimed at professional artists and can cost between $999 and $3,699.

The following morning’s keynote address, by Guitar Hero co-creator Charles Huang, barely mentioned the zSpace at all, shoehorning the device into a single slide at the end of the presentation. Instead, Huang spent most of his time talking about Guitar Hero, a prominent example of a great game that led consumers to buy new hardware — those plastic guitars.

During a Q&A following the presentation, Huang speculated that shooter and battle games played by hardcore gamers will drive adoption of the zSpace. That niche, he said, has proven willing to drop thousands of dollars on top-of-the-line gaming PC hardware from companies like Nvidia.

Huang also humorously noted that games have supplanted pornography as the standard-bearer for what new technologies consumers are willing to adopt, since they created the strongest revenue stream on Facebook, Apple’s App Store and Google Play.

Both zSpace CTO David Chavez and CEO Paul Kellenberger said independently that consumer games are not a top priority for the company right now. Kellenberger said educational games may be a proving ground, though, since colleges and universities are among their current target audiences.

Kellenberger said he expects the price of the zSpace to fall below $1000 within 18 to 24 months, and that when that happens, it’s only a matter of time until consumer games resembling the Unity AngryBots demo become a serious use case. Whether developers will agree with that assessment remains to be seen.

Lookout Mobile Security said yesterday that it has detected a significant outbreak of malware lurking inside 32 different apps that it says have been downloaded a combined two million to nine million times. (It’s unclear why that range is so large.)

Google was notified and the company removed the affected apps and killed the developer accounts associated with them. And Lookout’s product, the company says, gives its customers protection against it.

It’s called BadNews, and Lookout says it masquerades as “an innocent, if somewhat aggressive advertising network.” The network would initially serve up only ads, but later on, after having passed security scrutiny, it would start pushing malware to affected devices. Among other things, the servers controlling the apps were caught pushing AlphaSMS, a well-known app that creates fraudulent text messages.

One key takeaway is that apps need to be vetted and re-vetted more than once. “Enterprise security managers must assume that even very well-designed app-vetting processes will not be able to detect malicious behavior that hasn’t happened yet,” Lookout says. The delay in the bad behavior allowed it to be distributed pretty widely before the problems were detected.

About half of the naughty apps are in Russian, and AlphaSMS is intended to commit SMS fraud in Russia and neighboring countries, including Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia and Kazakhstan, Lookout says.

The folks at Lookout do happen to know a thing or two about hacking phones. In fact, its CEO, John Hering, appeared onstage at D: Dive Into Mobile earlier this week to show AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes just how easy it can be to hack a phone. It certainly doesn’t seem to be getting any harder.

1. Apple’s Ouster of AppGratis Is Just the Start of an App Store Crackdown
2. Confirmed: Apple Kicks AppGratis Out of the Store for Being Too Pushy
3. Yep, LinkedIn Acquires Newsreader Startup Pulse for $90 Million
4. WhatsApp: We’re Not Selling to Google
5. Twitter’s New Music App Launches Friday
6. BlackBerry Tops iPhone and Android … In a “Don’t Want” Poll
7. Salesforce Just Made Another Quiet Acquisition

[note: this article is from February, but resurfaced this week]

8. PC Sales Show Biggest Q1 Decline Ever
9. California Court: Even Checking Maps on Phone While Driving Not Okay
10. News Corp. Threatens to Pull Fox off the Airwaves if Aereo Wins

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

In remarks to the media Thursday, Fleur Pellerin, France’s junior minister for digital economy, decried Apple’s move as “extremely brutal” and called on the company to “behave ethically” in its treatment of the French startup and others like it.

“This isn’t virtuous and dignified behavior for a company of that scale,” Pellerin said, adding that Apple’s removal of AppGratis should make European regulators “think about legislation.”

“The French are the world’s second-largest developers of software applications for mobile devices behind the United States,” Pellerin said. “What is the sense of investing if, overnight, your business model is jeopardized by a unilateral decision. … This is an issue of fairness.”

Apple, which rejected AppGratis from the App Store last week for violating two of its developer guidelines, declined to comment specifically on Pellerin’s remarks. But as I noted here earlier this week, the company feels it was justified in removing the app.

Previously:

• Confirmed: Apple Kicks AppGratis Out of the Store for Being Too Pushy
• Apple’s Ouster of AppGratis Is Just the Start of an App Store Crackdown

On Tuesday, they were No. 3, by Thursday they were No. 400. It was mind-blowing how fast some of these supposed “hit apps” fell quickly to obscurity. Given what happened — and Apple’s response — the question remains, why did app developers use these tricks?

The main reason is that it is hard to get discovered in the App Store. Without some advantage, users might never find your app — and the amount that you can spend to get there above board is limited. Another reason is that when you hit the Top 25, then the Top 10 and then the Top 5, the exposure in the App Store generates significant organic downloads. In other words, people see you on the charts and they decide to download your app. In some ways, it’s not unlike how record labels manipulated the SoundScan charts in the 1990s to make seemingly unpopular records become hits.

But it’s hard to keep the schemers down. When Apple smartly moved against the bots last year, there was a brief gap in the market. Into that gap stepped a new breed of companies to help market apps. Sure, the scamsters always had their tricks. Notice an app pop up at No. 1? Look for hundreds of reviews that only have one word (amazing, incredible, awesome), or look for a shockingly low number of reviews for an app that’s No. 1. These are indicators that folks are doing something shady to make it to No. 1. And Apple, to its credit, tirelessly shuts them down and closes loopholes. It’s a thankless task.

But there are known, above-board companies whose mission it is to help also market apps. AppGratis, until getting booted for violations of the App Store rules, was one of those companies (Free App of the Day is another). In some ways, Apple’s halt to AppGratis is a big deal. Many of the games and apps that are at the top of the charts recently engaged AppGratis, which uses its large audience to drive large download volume. They do this by offering their members discounts on paid apps. This is particularly important to small or independent developers who lack the cross-promotion networks and marketing clout of established companies, and who can rely on a deal with AppGratis to expose them to a large audience.

While it is a big deal — to both developers and consumers — for Apple to remove AppGratis, in many ways, in the long-term view, it does not matter. And that is the key point.

There is no doubt that Apple’s vigilance makes the app store a friendly, clean and amazing place for consumers. But the fight to keep it that way is tireless and never-ending. As long as there is money to be made, app developers and app marketers will find new angles to lay siege to the charts.

But the win for Apple, and ultimately the loss for the app developers, is that in the end, the App Store really is a democracy, and no amount of cheating ever truly wins. What I mean by that is that there is a hidden meritocracy in the App Store charts. By hook or by crook, you might find a new angle to drive your app to the top, but at the end of the day, if consumers don’t like it, your app is going to fall.

What matters more than hitting the Top 10 is the ability to stay in theTop 10. That is the secret. There is tremendous movement in and out of the chart rankings, but the apps that stay there day after day and month after month — games like Candy Crush or Words With Friends, or apps like Instagram — they are the true winners. And staying there just cannot be gamed. The other apps are like shooting stars. They hit the charts via AppGratis, but there is ultimately something not sticky or fun or compelling about them, and they quickly slide back down.

So AppGratis may be gone, but companies like it will continue to crop up to take the app developer’s money. A hit is always going to be a hit, and that can only be achieved by creating an amazing product that people truly love.

Dan Porter is the former CEO of OMGPOP.

Apple said AppGratis was removed from the App Store for violating clauses 2.25 and 5.6 of its App Store Review Guidelines, which forbid apps that promote apps other than a developer’s own, and prohibit developers from using push notifications to deliver marketing messages.* A paid distribution app, AppGratis did both of these things, by promoting apps built by other developers via a once-daily notification. But browse the store’s listings today, and you’ll find that plenty of similar apps remain. And they, too, appear to violate 2.25 and/or 5.6.

Why hasn’t Apple banished them as well?

Well, there’s a very simple answer: It’s going to. And soon.

Sources familiar with Apple’s thinking tell AllThingsD that AppGratis’ ouster was a first step in a broader enforcement action generally targeted at app-discovery apps that run afoul of clauses 2.25 and 5.6.

I’m told that Apple feels that these apps threaten the legitimacy of the App Store charts by providing a way for developers to spend their way to a high ranking. Apple did something similar in 2011, when it rejected a number of applications running incentivized app installs within their apps.

The company also worries that such apps undermine the integrity of the App Store by cluttering it with alternative storefronts. As one source described it to me, some of these discovery apps create a scenario that’s similar to walking into Nordstrom and seeing a Walmart inside.** I’ve also heard that these apps are somehow degrading or complicating Apple’s integration of Chomp, the app search and discovery company it acquired earlier last year. But I haven’t yet been able to confirm that.

So there you have it: Reason and rationale.

Apple’s removal of AppGratis, then, wasn’t some mid-level misstep or a furtive policy change that the company prefers not to explain. It was a straight-ahead compliance action.

If it has been confusing, it’s because Apple, while being quite clear in citing the rules it is enforcing, has been unclear and scattershot in their actual enforcement. In other words, the company’s misstep here was in not attempting a blanket action that would have left little room for confusion.

Evidently, however, that’s coming, though with almost 800,000 apps in the store, some offenders will likely fall through the cracks.

And AppGratis, despite the “far from finished” reassurances of its CEO, is almost certainly finished as an iOS app — in its current incarnation, anyway.

Apple declined further comment on AppGratis’ ouster. AppGratis did not respond to a request for comment.

* If that’s the rule, why is it okay for Facebook to do this? I’m not sure, but there is one obvious explanation.

** Apple could conceivably ban such apps, citing clause 10.2, which forbids apps that look similar to those bundled on the iPhone, including the App Store. But it’s not, and I’ve been unable to determine why.

Initially, I thought we’d been caught in an internal communication accident and not the victim of a supposed ‘ban on third-party apps.’

– AppGratis CEO Simon Dawlat on Apple’s removal of his company’s app from the iTunes App Store

On Sunday, AppGratis, which promotes paid apps by offering one for free everyday, abruptly vanished from the App Store without explanation or comment from Apple. This, just a week after Cupertino had approved the iPad version of the app. At the time of its disappearance, word on the street had it that Apple banished the app for violation of an App Store Review Guideline clause that states:

2.25 Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected.

And that was indeed the case — partially. Apple confirmed to AllThingsD Monday that it removed AppGratis from the App Store for violating clause 2.25. But it said that the app also violated clause 5.6.

5.6 Apps cannot use Push Notifications to send advertising, promotions, or direct marketing of any kind.

Apple declined further comment on AppGratis’s ouster, framing the move as a standard response to guideline violations. But sources close to the company say it was more than a little troubled that AppGratis was pushing a business model that appeared to favor developers with the financial means to pay for exposure. “The App Store is intended as a meritocracy,” a source familiar with Apple’s thinking told AllThingsD.

In other words, app-discovery platforms are fine as long as they’re not built on paid recommendations.

In other words, app-discovery platforms built on paid recommendations aren’t going to fly with Apple.

This is a tough turn of events for AppGratis, which recently closed a $13.5 million Series A round of financing. But it’s also foreboding news for other apps with similar business models. Sources say that Apple is looking at them, too, and they could face the same consequences if they’re found to be in violation of 2.25 and 5.6. Recall that this isn’t the first time Apple has eighty-sixed a discovery app for running afoul of its guidelines. Last December it ousted AppShopper for violating 2.25.

AppGratis did not respond to a request for comment.

Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, who once employed Jobs shortly before he and Steve Wozniak started Apple, doesn’t have any specific names to answer that question. But what he does have is a new book, out today, to aid in the search: “Finding the Next Steve Jobs — How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent.”

And Bushnell should know about the importance of recognizing that talent — during Atari’s heyday, he turned down the opportunity to own one-third of Jobs’s and Wozniak’s nascent company. By 1980, he writes in the book, “I was beginning to think it might turn out to be a mistake.”

“Finding the Next Steve Jobs” is being released by Net Minds, a print/e-book hybrid publishing startup led by former Yahoo exec Tim Sanders. Bushnell said it uses Jobs as a metaphor for the creative iconoclasts who clash with corporate culture and can’t get hired. He sat down with AllThingsD to explain further.

AllThingsD: Just how close were you to Steve after his brief involvement with Atari?

Nolan Bushnell: We’d talk on the phone infrequently, but he’d come up to [my house in] Woodside about once a month, usually on a Saturday or Sunday morning, and we’d go up on the hill and talk. Occasionally, I’d go down to his place, but a lot of the time it was him coming up to my place.

Why are we even looking for the “next Steve Jobs?”

Steve took a failing computer company — and they probably would have never brought him back if they weren’t at the end of their rope — and turned it into the highest-market-cap company in the world. People were always aware that innovative solutions are good for your company. I think this just underscored it in a really powerful way. It wasn’t just through cutting costs or innovative marketing. Though Steve was a pretty good marketer.

But that was when he returned to Apple in 1997. Most of the time when people talk about the “next Steve Jobs,” they’re using that phrase to refer to entrepreneurs who are still early on in their careers. So, are those people really that hard up for work?

I believe there are Steve Jobses all around us. Really, what is happening is that they’re being edited out of importance. Right now, Google is doing some great things, but Hewlett-Packard is trying to commit suicide. Every company needs to have a skunkworks, to try things that have a high probability of failing. You try to minimize failure, but at the same time, if you’re not willing to try things that are inherently risky, you’re not going to make progress.

Speaking of progress, what’s the most exciting thing for you in videogames?

I think the next big game opportunity is Google Glasses [sic]. If I told you all my ideas for it, I’d have to kill you. And the Oculus Rift. The game business reinvents itself every five years. The last five years have been the days of mobile gaming and shortform gaming, exemplified by Rovio with Angry Birds and Zynga with FarmVille. And that is over.

(Nolan’s daughter and PR agent, Alissa Bushnell, quickly jumped in at this point, asking him to clarify what he meant by “over.”)

Most games, by their nature, have a half-life of two years or less. It’s the outlier that has a half-life that’s longer than that. But that doesn’t mean that the marketplace is synchronized. So you have the early adopters coming into something, and they soon encourage the more timid to come in. It broadens the group. But players’ engagement is not lengthened.

But smartphones and tablets continue to be hugely popular, so how are their games “over”?

All the money’s out. Do I really want to do a mobile game that’s one of 300,000, where discoverability is everything? You really have to have a little more sizzle on the steak. I would rather be one of 100 apps for Google Glass than one of 300,000 for iOS and Android.

Does the potential for a new, game-changing entrepreneur exist independently of how these different companies or industries are changing?

I really believe that the future is happening whether we want it or not. The companies that force the future to happen faster will succeed in the next 20 years, and the ones that are stuck in today will lose market share. People say, “I want to be around in 20 years.” I say, “I have no idea. But if you’re not doing 10 different things, if you don’t have four skunkworks, then you’re not going to find the next thing.”

(Clarification: an earlier version of this story said Bushnell employed both Jobs and Wozniak. Although Wozniak was involved with and paid for his work on Atari’s game “Breakout,” he was paid by Jobs rather than Bushnell’s company).

Yahoo has bought Summly, the mobile news reader app founded by a young British entrepreneur.

In a statement, the London-based company said it had bought the tiny outfit, which will close its app. The price was not disclosed (although I will try to find out soon enough). But the company had been seeking additional funding recently at a big valuation, in stark contrast to its small size (less than one million downloads), staff (five) and business model (zero revenue).

(Update: Sources tell me Yahoo paid just about $30 million for Summly, mostly in cash, with 10 percent in stock, for three employees.)

AllThingsD.com reported in December that Yahoo was looking closely at the startup, with CEO Marissa Mayer meeting with its founder Nick D’Aloisio. As we noted then, Yahoo was aiming at trendy mobile “acq-hires” to give the sleepy Silicon Valley Internet giant some sizzle and improve its moribund mobile offerings.

Mayer has been buying up a range of similar small mobile startups, largely for their teams of talented and innovative engineers. And, at a recent employee meeting, its M&A head Jackie Reses said the Silicon Valley company was looking at two significant purchases and a half-dozen smaller ones.

Said Yahoo: “Founder Nick D’Aloisio and the Summly team are joining Yahoo! in the coming weeks. While the Summly app will close, we will acquire the technology and you’ll see it come to life throughout Yahoo!’s mobile experiences soon. We’re not disclosing purchase price or other terms of the deal.”

Yahoo mobile head Adam Cahan wrote a blog post about the deal, as did D’Aloisio, who also tweeted news of it:

@summly has signed an agreement to be acquired by Yahoo!! Excited for the next chapter of Summly! Thanks to all who have supported me.

— Nick D’Aloisio (@nickdaloisio) March 25, 2013

News readers have been getting snapped up of late. CNN acquired Zite for $20 million in 2011, while we reported that LinkedIn was in the midst of buying Pulse for upwards of $50 million.

The 17-year-old D’Aloisio created the high-profile news reading app, which garnered much attention in the last year in the mobile space, which is probably what attracted Yahoo to it.

As I wrote:

D’Aloisio — who looks like he could easily be a member of One Direction if this tech thing did not work out — is perhaps a perfect storm for Yahoo, which is seeking to show that it can attract innovative, young entrepreneurs to the company, while also looking to strengthen its nearly bare mobile cupboard.

Summly is all that and a bag of (fish and) chips, with a very slick app for the Apple iPhone that has become one of the more popular in the App Store since it was re-launched last month. The company has said it has been downloaded 500,000 times.

It deserves the attention, as it is a pleasure to use — think an even hipper version of Flipboard with some more sass. The handsomely designed app summarizes news stories — all using a natural language processing algorithm — in only a few sentences and in under 400 characters. Users can then swipe through topics and stories quickly and click in to be directed to the full story on the original news site.

Summly originally started as a prototype app called Trimit, which soon garnered attention and seed funding from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing’s investment firm. In no time, it had a range of other investors, ponying up about $1.5 million, including trendy ones like Ashton Kutcher and tech types like Zynga’s Mark Pincus, Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky.

Since then, it has been striking content deals, including with News Corp. (which owns this site) and others, which seem to be attracted by its investor pedigree, its solid technology and — perhaps most of all — its media-darling founder.

To get an idea of the adorable hip factor involved, here’s a really clever video D’Aloisio did with actor Stephen Fry, who is also an investor in the startup:

Summly Launch from Summly on Vimeo.

1.) Samsung Galaxy S4: Bigger Display and Bolder Software — But Is It Better Enough?

2.) How Apple Gets All the Good Apps

3.) Telling Employees He Hasn’t “Walked the Talk,” Cisco’s John Chambers Leans In on Women in the Workplace Issue

4.) LinkedIn to Buy Pulse Newsreader for More Than $50M (and here’s what they could do with Pulse)

5.) How One Boring Company Pulled Off the Perfect SXSW Troll

6.) Crowdfunding for a Cause: Nonprofits Can Now Hold Fundraisers on Crowdtilt

7.) IBM Makes a Big Bet on OpenStack in the Cloud

8.) Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Gets a Million-Dollar Bonus After Six Months on the Job

9.) Nokia: A Microsoft Surface Phone Could Screw Us

10.) Outbox: Yahoo Mail Head Sharma Leaves Company (Update: And he has now joined Disney’s online parks division)

For more of the week in review, please follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

At a Tuesday hearing, Apple argued that requiring developers to sell their apps through its iTunes App Store and nowhere else is not an antitrust violation, nor is charging devs a 30 percent cut of their proceeds for distibution. Just because there are no third-party storefronts peddling discounted iPhone apps doesn’t mean Apple is abusing a monopoly position over iOS apps. The company doesn’t set the price for paid applications.

The plaintiffs in the case brought their suit against Apple in 2011, claiming that their inability to legally buy iPhone apps from anywhere but the App Store was proof that Apple is a monopolist.

But Apple, which has fended off similar lawsuits in the past — specifically one that accused it of creating a music-download monopoly with iTunes — says the sort of vertical integration it has created between the iTunes App Store and its iOS devices is perfectly legal. As Apple attorney Dan Wall said during yesterday’s hearing, “There’s nothing illegal about creating a system that is closed in a sense.”

Apple doesn’t like a scandal, especially concerning anything genitalia-related. And it seemed the immediate solution was to cut Vine from the prominently featured list of “Editor’s Picks” in the App Store.

But that wasn’t enough. On Tuesday evening, Vine pushed an update to its app for download. Now, when users download the Vine app or update for the first time, they’re faced with a “17+” age-restricted material rating.

That’s a big bummer for Twitter, but it seems it wasn’t avoidable. We’ve been told by people familiar with the matter that Apple reminded Twitter of Clause 3.8 from the App Store guidelines, which says:

“Developers are responsible for assigning appropriate ratings to their apps. Inappropriate ratings may be changed by Apple.“

In other words, Apple gave Twitter a nudge, implying Twitter might want to change its maturity rating in order to keep within the confines of the App Store guidelines. Otherwise, Vine could have faced ejection. Twitter did it, albeit begrudgingly.

Apple declined to comment on my report, and Twitter isn’t responding to requests for comment.

To some degree, we should have expected this. Apple cut Twitter a lot of slack when the porn scandal first broke — at least, by Apple’s standards. (This, after all, is the company that deep-sixed a comic-book-app version of Joyce’s “Ulysses” for depicting cartoon boobs.) Why? Probably because Apple and Twitter are elbow-rubbing pals, with deep ties into one another’s companies and software.

But as we argued last week, Vine doesn’t have a porn problem per se — it has a porn discovery problem. That gnarly porno found on Vine was all too easily surfaced in the app, due in part to the nature of the service itself. Search a hashtag keyword for sex, penis or what have you, and you’ll be taken straight to the hardcore stuff. That’s not as easy to find in, say, YouTube, which has a more mature engine for filtering out objectionable content. Or even Tumblr (though Tumblr is also rated 17+ in the App Store).

The prudish Apple can deal with the fact that yes, we are human, and yes, we watch porn (lots of it). And to some degree, it will always exist across the Internet. It’s a fact of life. But what Apple can’t deal with is said porn front and center, easily discoverable for any and all to see. It’s why SnapChat has a 12+ rating, and why Vine doesn’t.

In other words, think of yourself as a teenager to Apple’s repressed mother — you hide your porn under your mattress. You don’t leave it out on the coffee table.

This is no doubt a bad thing for Vine and Twitter. Video and photo sharing apps are some of the fastest rising among the teenage group. That’s the category that SnapChat is currently dominating, where Tumblr is killing it, and the age group that every social media company needs to dominate. Slapping a mature rating on Vine automatically eliminates any youngsters who have parental settings turned on from downloading it, potentially a large swath of the teen population.

Twitter might be advised to hurry up and release that Vine Android app post haste — Google isn’t as uptight with its app market.

So, no, tweets haven’t become more lascivious than usual. Let me catch you up.

Twitter released a new video-sharing app, Vine, last week. It has blown up, rising fast to the top of Apple’s App Store. But over the weekend, users found it was entirely too easy to come across NSFW content — i.e. weird porno — using the app.

Funny, at first. But as The Verge first pointed out, that may be a problem for Apple, the famously conservative company that has been heavily promoting the app since its release. And more than just Apple, it could be a problem for Vine’s usability in the long run.

So Twitter faces two problems right now. First, is Vine going to become a haven for porn mini-vids (the latest Chatroulette)? And the more pressing question: How long will Apple put up with having the porny Vine app in the App Store?

From what I understand, Twitter is currently in violation of Apple ToS item 18.2: “Apps that contain user generated content that is frequently pornographic (ex “Chat Roulette” apps) will be rejected.”

So parse that language, paying special attention to the word “frequently.” Twitter doesn’t need to kill all the porn. It just needs to make porn a heck of a lot harder to find. In other words, porn appears only as “frequently” as you can sniff it out. Not easy to find? No longer a problem.

But fixing the discovery issue isn’t simple. As of Vine’s launch, it has been easy to go into Vine’s “Explore” menu, start typing something that begins with “P-E-N” or “P-O-R” and have the hashtag or search term pop up for the words “penis” or “porn,” complete with a healthy cache of hardcore porno to browse through. Part of that problem rests on the issue of the hashtag — the built-in mechanism for discovering lots of content associated along the lines of a single theme.

The other, I would guess, is the myriad ways that the degenerate human mind can figure out how to hash something pornographically by search term. (Just ask this guy how creative some people can be with their porn labels.)

The impetus now is for Vine to figure out how to nix those prevalently pornographic hash tags or search terms, and do it fast.

Right now, despite Twitter being in pretty clear violation of Apple’s bylaws, Apple seems to be cutting Twitter some slack. Apple opted not to deep-six the app from the App Store — as is the usual protocol for something in violation of Apple’s ToS — but instead has appeared to just cut Vine down from Apple’s list of “Editor’s Picks.” (It certainly pays to be buddy-buddy with a company like Apple, eh, Twitter?)

But however much slack Twitter has been given, I assume that the Vine team is still under the gun to get the whole ordeal smoothed over. It’s probably a strain, too, as Vine’s team consists of only a handful of engineers in New York. Tackling pornography has proved challenging to powerhouses as large as YouTube, staffed by hundreds of Googlers, much less a little startup in its first launch days.

“We’re in the process of changing how users find and view sensitive content,” a Twitter spokesperson told AllThingsD. “We’re experimenting with a number of approaches and will continue to iterate.”

Right now Twitter looks to be nixing the porny hashtags — like #porn, for instance — as a first step on the road to this.

“Yes, but!” you may argue, “there are workarounds! You can upload porn clips and label them with non-sexual hashtags!”

This is true. And I expect that Twitter will continue to argue for relying on user-side crowd control to report said content violations, or potentially draft a team member into working on this more intensely somehow. Perhaps the solution rests in some sort of combination of manual and automatic, computerized curation. I don’t know.

But as my friend Sam over at Gizmodo reminds us, trying to eliminate porn from the Web is a fool’s errand. You can’t get rid of it all.

You’ve just got to find a better way of hiding it.

Perhaps as soon as tomorrow, people familiar with the company tell me.

But when Vine does launch, you won’t find it on Twitter, at least not as a fully integrated feature.

Prior to the Twitter acquisition, Vine was going to be a standalone iOS app. And that’s still the case: The startup still operates on its own, and if you want to use the service you’ll need to download it from Apple’s App store.

Why would you want to download Vine? Because it’s supposed to be a fun tool for making and sharing very short video clips — no longer than six seconds a pop — in the same way that Instagram worked for photos. And it’s designed in a similar way, with the ability to follow other Vine users’ clips, explore stuff from people you don’t know, etc.

There are other apps that do something similar, but one notable difference with Vine is the way you use it — after hitting a “record” button on the app, you hold your thumb on the screen to start filming. Take it off, and the camera stops.  You can use the app to create one straight take, or take lots of little shots, and make digital montages or flip-books (take a look at Costolo’s clip, below, which looks like it’s composed of eight or nine very quick takes).

All of that’s according to people who’ve seen the app.

Those people also tell me that one thing you don’t see on Vine is any kind of Twitter branding. This is a Twitter-owned video service, but for now, at least, it’s not “Twitter’s video service.”

As Costolo demonstrated today, you’ll be able to share video from the app to Twitter. But that’s about it as far as integration goes. You could see how Twitter might want to link more deeply with Vine at some point, perhaps with a “record” button on Twitter’s own app, but not right now.

For more info, you might want to follow Vine’s own Twitter account, which hasn’t had anything to say quite yet.

Steak tartare in six seconds. vine.co/v/bOIqn6rLeIDvia @dhof

— dick costolo (@dickc) January 23, 2013

The addictive action game, a viral hit on iOS and Android, has such a fervent built-in audience that a sequel, Temple Run 2, hit No. 1 on Apple’s App Store charts within hours of its launch earlier today.

While the original game has players running through an infinite series of flat corridors, booby traps and pits, the new one adds hills, curves, ziplines, mine carts and more. Like its predecessor, though, TR2 is free and supported through in-app purchases.

AllThingsD caught up with co-creator Keith Shepherd, who heads up the indie game shop Imangi Studios with his partner and wife, Natalia Luckyanova.

AllThingsD: What was the thinking behind a sequel? Why do one?

Keith Shepherd: We wound up with all this stuff we wanted to do in Temple Run that we couldn’t physically do as an update to the original. It was just a really small team of us that built the first one (Shepherd, Luckyanova, and artist Kiril Tchangov), and we had no idea that it was going to go on to become this worldwide phenomenon. It wasn’t designed to be ported to other platforms or to be continually added to over the next couple of years. We wanted a fresh start.

Since you rebuilt everything from scratch for Temple Run 2, are there mistakes you made with the first game that you had a chance to correct?

The first game, we built on our own with our own engine in-house. But we wanted to have a more vibrant, rich environment with curves and hills and better graphics, so we rewrote the game in Unity. Mobile hardware is changing so fast and getting so much more capable that it’s really hard to stay on top of your own engine technology. They’ve got a huge team of people focusing on that.

What do you think of the freemium model? If you had known back in 2011 that this would be such a phenomenon, wouldn’t you have wanted to charge 99 cents for it?

When we launched it, it started at 99 cents. It didn’t catch on at 99 cents, but it was the same game.

I had thought it was always free — my mistake.

Most people don’t know that. They think of it as a free game, but that’s how we launched it, because we had never done freemium before. If you’ve spent five months of your life working on something, it’s kind of a scary proposition to put it out there for free. [After we made it free], it snowballed into this viral hit and the in-app purchases way exceeded what we would have made from the paid game.

Last year, AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka talked to Igor Pusenjak, the co-creator of Doodle Jump, and he said they’re not working on any other games — just Doodle Jump, because it has performed so well. Are you planning to spend more time on the Temple Run franchise, or is this it for now?

You find with success that there’s so much more that fans want from a game. We’re still small, but small means that we can’t run a lot of things in parallel. At some point, we would like to make new games, but right now it’s all just focused on Temple Run.

Are you planning to keep Imangi Studios small?

The core team for Temple Run 2 was five people (for the new game, Imangi added programmer Jeff Ruediger and artist Pete Parisi from Fuzzy Cube Software). We do want to stay small. Natalia and I made a conscious choice: This is a lifestyle. We really love actually making the games and developing the games, and we feel that if we grew the team a lot and tried to grow the company, we’d wind up doing more things that we’re not as excited about, managing teams and being less involved.

Though the two companies have a trial date scheduled for Aug. 19, 2013, U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte on Monday ordered them into settlement talks to resolve their differences over the term. The discussion is to be held on March 21 and attended by executives with full authority to negotiate and to settle the case. And make no mistake, they must attempt to settle it. “No participant in the settlement conference will be permitted to leave the settlement conference before it is concluded,” Laporte wrote in her order.

Not that such mandates are any guarantee of a resolution. Apple and Amazon have been going round and round over the app store mark for nearly two years now. Apple contends that Amazon has improperly used its App Store mark to promote its Amazon Appstore.

“Consumers of mobile software downloads are likely to be confused as to whether Amazon’s mobile software download service is sponsored or approved by Apple,” Apple alleged when it sued Amazon in March of 2011.

Meanwhile, Amazon insists that the term “app store” is generic, and that it’s silly for Apple to claim otherwise, when its own executives use it generically. “Apple presumably does not contend that its past and current CEOs made false statements regarding those other app stores to thousands of investors in earnings calls,” Amazon said. “To the contrary, the use of the term ‘app store’ to refer to stores selling apps is commonplace in the industry.”

Earlier this month, a district court granted Amazon’s motion for summary judgment on Apple’s allegation that the retailer is guilty of false advertising for improperly using its App Store mark. That was a victory for Amazon, but a partial one. Apple has five more claims pending against the retailer, including trademark infringement and unfair competition — the issues Laporte is hoping to force the companies to resolve at this settlement conference.

And yet, contacts still have room to grow. Enter Ringya, an iPhone app which promises to add a layer of context on top of our sprawling lists of co-workers, club members, parent groups and so on.

It works like this: Instead of sorting everyone by name, Ringya files contacts into “rings.” You can share a “ring” with others, meaning the contact info of everyone on the list can be ported from one phone to another in one step.

(Ringya made the list you see to the right before we talked and shared it with me. And no, I have no idea why they gave my co-workers formal prefixes).

Then, if someone who’s sharing the ring adds a new contact, all users will see the new person in the list when they look at the app.

Gal Nachum, Ringya’s co-founder, calls this “inherent virality,” since using the mobile app normally spreads its reach. If a Ringya user shares their ring with someone who’s not a user, the second person gets a personalized text message asking them to download the app.

Unfortunately for some potential users (especially those without iPhones, although an Android version of the app is on the way), this means the organized contact lists are accessible only through the app.

For those who do have the iPhone app, though, Ringya offers a few nifty features. As with the mobile messaging app GroupMe, it’s very easy to contact everyone in a ring at once.

The difference is that while GroupMe lets users text or message each other in-app, Ringya users can contact their lists via a phone call, text message or email.

Especially promising is the context Ringya offers for incoming calls. When someone from one of your rings calls you, Ringya shows whatever info it has about that person (e.g. “Editor at AllThingsD”) before you pick up the phone.

Finally, the app lets users create a new ring by snapping a picture of a paper contact list. This is definitely an effort-saver in theory, especially for organizations with more than a dozen members that don’t put their rosters online. But the import of a short three-person contact list I made took more than 10 minutes to process.

Even with my handwriting, though — which was once generously likened to chicken scratch — all the names and numbers were imported perfectly.

Ringya is a free app available for download from the iOS App Store here.