The most-viewed post I’ve ever had on this blog is one from May about how porn producers were looking forward to the launch of the Palm Pre smartphone, which promised more openness than the Apple iPhone. Downloadable software, or “apps,” has been one of the major reasons why smartphone sales (particularly the iPhone) are going bananas. Apple, however, has taken a lot of criticism for being very tyrannical about which apps it allows on the iPhone, which is particularly the case for any sort of porn software. Palm, on the other hand, seemed to extend an invitation to porn producers to come and develop apps for its flagship phone, and the porn producers were suitably excited about it.

As it turns out, it looks like the Palm Pre was the wrong horse to back for porn companies. Not only have sales of the phone been poor, but the crop of phones based on Google’s Android operating system are proving to be much more… well, sexy.

A Seattle start-up called MiKandi, which is run by former Microsoft and T-Mobile executives, is offering an app-store-within-an-app-store for porn. Here’s a video that explains it (don’t worry, it’s safe for work):

In a nutshell, MiKandi is looking to become the one-stop porn portal for Android phone users. “[MiKandi] wanted to find a niche that was not currently being served and adult applications were at the top of the list,” one of its founders told PC World. “There are no other adult app stores out there to meet this need of users and developers. So we entered the market with MiKandi to provide value to the mobile application ecosystem.”

For porn producers, this app store is an intriguing idea. On the one hand, they can choose to develop software for MiKandi and let that company take care of all the potential headaches that will inevitably arise when dealing with phone companies and/or Google. On the other hand, if MiKandi can create a porn-based app store on Android, why couldn’t a company like Playboy or Vivid field their own individual apps and keep all the money they might make from them? Ultimately MiKandi is looking to be a middle man here, which could be a good or bad thing.

For phone users - while MiKandi is promising to extend its app store to other smartphones (including presumably the iPhone) - I’m betting this is something that phone companies and/or Google clamp down on quickly. I mean come on, it’s porn, the scourge of our civilization!