San Francisco Gives Apple and Google 28 Days on Nudify Apps

San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu sent formal demand letters to Apple and Google on 17 July giving both companies 28 days to remove 13 AI "nudify" apps from their stores or face civil penalties. Eight of the apps were on the App Store and five on Google Play. All of them do the same thing: take a photograph of a clothed person and generate a synthetic nude image of them, without that person's knowledge or consent.

The interesting part is not the takedown. It is who the letters are addressed to.

Going after the shelf, not the product

Enforcement against non-consensual intimate imagery has mostly chased the people who build the tools. That work has been slow and largely futile, because the developers are frequently offshore, frequently anonymous, and trivially replaceable. Chiu's letters take a different route. They invoke California's Unfair Competition Law and the state's existing statutes on non-consensual intimate imagery to argue that Apple and Google are themselves culpable as distributors, since they host the apps, process the payments, and take a cut of the revenue.

That framing matters far more than 13 listings. If it holds up, the obligation to screen shifts from the long tail of developers to the two companies that control effectively all mobile app distribution in the United States, and those two companies have the resources to actually do the screening.

Both moved quickly. According to TechCrunch, Apple removed three of the eight named apps and began terminating the associated developer accounts. Google told Engadget that all five Play Store apps in the letter had already been suspended. Neither company conceded the legal argument about distributor liability, which is the point they will actually fight over.

The scale behind the 13

The 13 apps were not discovered by the city. They came out of reporting by the Tech Transparency Project, which published surveys in January and April of this year identifying dozens of these apps across both stores. TTP's estimate is that the apps it found had been downloaded roughly 480 million times and had taken in something like $120 million.

Those figures deserve a caveat. Download counts for this category are notoriously unreliable, since apps get renamed, cloned, and relisted constantly, and the same user often appears several times. But even discounted heavily, the numbers describe a functioning consumer business operating in plain sight on two curated storefronts, both of which have written policies that prohibit exactly this.

That gap between policy and enforcement is the real target here. Both stores already ban sexual content generated without consent. The apps were listed anyway, usually under euphemisms, sometimes for years.

Where this sits

Regulators have been converging on this problem from several directions at once. The EU outlawed nudify apps outright in its digital omnibus package last month. Meta pulled an Instagram feature after users found it could be turned on strangers, and xAI has sued a user over abuse images made with Grok.

San Francisco's version is narrower than any of those and probably more consequential. A European ban changes what is legal in Europe. A demand letter that successfully establishes app-store liability under California law changes what gets distributed everywhere, because neither Apple nor Google maintains a separate California catalogue. Chiu has 28 days to find out whether the argument sticks.