The Russian launch of Apple's iTunes didn't quite go according to plan on Wednesday after a bit of temporary code left unchanged by one of the developers ended up pointing users to a pornographic search engine.
While much of the electronic content store displayed exactly what Apple wanted, a section for "More films in different languages" contained a temporary url that points to xxx.xxx, a porn site. Because of the way iTunes is set up, the store automatically displayed the site's front page.
The glitch was first spotted by Russian Apple news site iPhones.ru. A fix is presumably forthcoming.
The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs was famously anti-porn and openly made examples of developers that managed to land sexually explicit apps on the iTunes store. Despite his best efforts, however, lots of sexually explicit content remains on iTunes to this day.
Still, displaying the front page of a pornographic search engine probably wasn't what the Russian iTunes developers were hoping for. On the plus side, Apple's iTunes launched in 55 other countries on Wednesday, including Turkey, India and South Africa, without a hitch.
The incident will go down as another major flub for the once dominant smartphone and tablet maker, which has seen its share of those markets dwindling substantially thanks to stiff competition from Google's Android operating system. The company also recently fired the project manager in charge of Apple Maps after the product launch was littered with glitches and errors.
