It appears the "Hottest Girls" are not. But maybe they are.

Earlier today the "Hottest Girls" app was being touted as the first iTunes/iPhone app approved by Apple to show full nudity, promising there'd be a lot more skin seen on iPhone screens.

But by mid-day on the East Coast, it seemed the app had simply slipped past the Apple censors, and it was removed from the App store.

By late afternoon, however, the developer Allen Leung, said in a blog post that the app was just temporarily unavailable due to demand. "The server usage is extremely high because of the popularity of this app. Thus, by not distributing the app, we can prevent our servers from crashing. Those who already have the app will still be able to use our app. To answer the question on everyone's mind: Yes, the topless images will still be there when it is sold again."

With Apple not responding to invitations to comment, we're left to speculate on the veracity of Leung's claims as well as what happened at the App Store approval office today.

The "Hottest Girls" app at issue was already on sale at the Apple App Store and offered photos of women in lingerie. But with an update, "Hottest Girls" showed pictures of topless and naked women.

When Leung told the Macenstein blog he uploaded naked pictures in an update to the app today, most industry watchers believed the move was authorized by Apple in a nod to its recent parental controls built into the iPhone SDK 3.0.

But by mid-day, "Hottest Girls" was already removed from the App store, according to blog posts and other reports. This left industry watchers wondering whether Apple had inadvertently let the update go through and then banned it, or, as Leung says, authorized it but removed it temporarily at his request.

The brouhaha over the bare-chested babes at the app store isn't surprising given that controversy had erupted over Apple's iPhone app approval process, which critics charged was inconsistent, confusing and based on arbitrary criteria. At issue, basically, was the fact that some content deemed 'mature' was already available for iTunes, and the iPhone could access that material through its Web browser.