CUPERTINO, Calif. – Not even a day after the world went crazy over the inaptly-named “Porn App” for the iPhone, Apple has removed it from the App Store.

“Hottest Girls” debuted Wednesday and was pulled the same day, following a firestorm of publicity over the sanctioned download that featured pictures of nude women.

Created by Allen Leung and available for $1.99, “Hottest Girls” was the first App approved for the new adult rating (”Rated 17+ for “Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity”), introduced last week with the 3.0 software update.

According to a post Thursday on TechCruch, “Other applications with the new rating could still be downloaded without a problem, so it seems Apple just let ‘Hottest Girls’ slip through the cracks – something we suggested as a possibility yesterday as well – and has now fixed it by blocking it specifically.”

Only yesterday, Daniel Ionescu of PCWorld was predicting a veritable onslaught of similarly-themed Apps.

“A wave of similar applications can be expected over the coming weeks in the App Store,” he wrote. “Now that the door is open, adult content providers, such as Playboy (and so many others), get a new market. And with in-application purchases and updates, I can see quite a lucrative market coming.”

The future of approved “explicit” content on the iPhone is now seriously in question. One reason for the quick about-face by a company that has always been a paragon of the methodical is the fact that the “Hottest Girls” App was referred to as “porn,” a stretch by anyone’s definition. Indeed, mere nudity can hardly be considered pornography anymore, especially when the Internet is awash with sexually-explicit content.

Still, that was how the NC-17 APP was referred to, and perhaps Apple, seeing what Google is dealing with regarding similar erotic content the Chinese consider “pornographic” and “obscene,” preferred to take the hit now and back out with minimal injury to its reputation as a company that does not make mistakes of this sort.