Secrets of The App Store
August 7, 2008 by Ryan Ray
We all love the app store. One central spot to go and find that awesome app for your iPhone. Other “smartphones” don’t have this simple, easy to use spot to come and find the apps for their phones. They must scour the depths of Google, or Yahoo, etc… to track down an app that might take us iPhone users 2 minutes to find and download. Their “smartphones” can’t go and get the app by itself, they can only access and install apps from their desktop computers. Nothing like the beautiful app store on our iPhones. Even when updates are released to the apps those other phones have no idea that the app has been updated. Not the case for iPhone users. We really are quite lucky to have such a feature on our phones. But don’t let all of that goodness fool you for too long.
In the last week we’ve been hearing some crazy things about the app store. One app of particular interest is call Netshare. It’s been in and out of the app store not once, but TWICE. Both times that it’s disappeared Apple has given no explanations. They just seem to take the app out whenever they feel like it and add it back when they are feeling generous. If you don’t know what Netshare does, it’s name implies it all. This app lets you share you EDGE or 3G connection to another device. That device is usually a laptop, and this method of sharing your data connection is called tethering. Other apps have suffered the same unpredictable fate. Apple pulls them with no good reason attached at all. This has been annoying some users and especially developers. After all the developers have to wait quite a while for Apple to approve their app. Then to have it pulled so quickly has got to be very frustrating. This isn’t the end of the app store woes though, so get a load of this.
Apparently it is possible for Apple to deactivate apps on our iPhones if they so choose to. It is a bit creepy if you think about it. This means that our iPhones are phoning home to Apple somehow. I’m sure this is in place for the Enterprise feature where you can wipe the phone of any personal information, and also for applications that somehow pass Apple’s CQ and onto iPhones. If the app is malicious Apple can then in one push of a button wipe the app from all the iPhones that downloaded it. They say this works by checking a list of blacklisted apps against the ones you have installed on your phone. So far no apps are blacklisted and we are all safe, but it does creep me out slightly to know this is possible.
What do you think about this news of our beloved app store? What about the people who jailbreak their phones? I wonder if after jail breaking your phone if it will still phone home to Apple. If it does can Apple mess with your iPhone from their HQ? How funny would it be to contact all of the jail broke iPhones with a message that says restore me to Apple’s guidelines or I will self destruct. Anyway it’s your turn to let me know what you think about this, is it an invasion of privacy or a welcomed safety measure? Should Apple be able to disable apps on our iPhones?
Popularity: 3% [?]
Ranked #36 out of 234 posts (with 22.22 points) ?
Related Articles:
[...] First big stat first, the app store has brought in over $30 million in sales in the first month. That’s huge if you really think about it. This obviously doesn’t take into consideration the free apps, but at $30 million that means that Apple took home a sweet $9 million of my math’s right. Apple says they’ve had over 60 million downloads with most of those being free apps, but Steve Jobs pointed out they are selling about $1 million worth of apps a day. Not bad at all, I’ve never heard of these kinds of numbers with any other platform. Maybe Adobe can release some numbers on their first month of CS3 sales, or Microsoft will tell us lies about the first month if Vista sales, haha. Not even the original Mac developing platform has this kind of central location to buy apps for your computer. Perhaps that’s the trick to getting people to buy applications. I’m going to patent that idea for the Mac app store, so no one steal it! Also confirmed by Steve Jobs which I mentioned on this website was the KILL SWITCH. [...]