Recently, there was an unusual entrant in the Apple App Store known as "Boyfriend Maker". This title focused on the ability to develop several young men, vaguely similar in appearance, and turn them into "boyfriend material". I know, it sounds bizarre, but it only gets weirder when you find out why the "Boyfriend Maker" app was pulled. It turns out that not only were the boyfriends either on some kind of medication or not on sufficient amounts of it, but they also had a disturbing tendency to lapse into sexual dialogue, violent dialogue, racist dialogue and dialogue that was just plain, well, disturbing. But Apple's pulling of the metaphorical plug may well bring an extra boost to HTML5 development, and the HTML5 gaming movement.

Sure, the boyfriends of "Boyfriend Maker" are often funny for their sheer outlandishness--trying to keep this PG, I can mention that one boyfriend expressed a belief that he was, in fact, "an alien in Santa's trash can eating a burrito praying for warmth as it slowly dances the tango"--and there's a whole tumblr devoted to absolutely wacky and occasionally frightening nonsense (and yes, it can get downright scary--I mean actually scary, the kind of stuff you'd never want to hear come out of someone's mouth that was sitting right across from you) that spills from these boyfriends' mouths.

By way of example, when confronted about the Twilight series, the boyfriend said he liked it "more than anything else", and when asked if he was Team Jacob or Team Edward, said that he was "Team Jakeward". When told that wasn't an option, he promptly pitched an epic hissy fit, insisting that "you are not an option".

It makes sense, of course, that Apple wasn't interested in an app that got as raunchy as "Boyfriend Maker" did--and trust me, it did--but while some already talked of a move to Android, I got to thinking that this was a prime time for an HTML5 development. Admittedly, Apple's got an image to think of here, and they want to keep things reasonably family friendly. But for all of us who were thinking, hey, I'm over eighteen and maybe I'd like a little dose of incoherent ribaldry from my app, we're plain old out of luck over at Camp Apple. But with HTML5, it can work with any platform that can surf the Web. That takes a whole lot of pressure off app developers to keep things family-friendly, and gives regular adult consumers more choice in the market.

Whether "Boyfriend Maker" will make the leap to HTML5 app or not remains to be seen, but one thing's for sure, HTML5 does offer quite a bit of possibility to get apps onto more platforms, and away from the heavy-handed censorship going on in the app stores. It's a system that's not just for bringing old Atari games back to life as web browser gaming fodder, but may well be the way to keep out from under Apple's thumb.