Given the number of Apps available in the Apple App Store (it was recorded at 775,000 Apps in January 2013 according to this) so it is understandable that sometimes apps can just slip by the approval process and quite soon afterwards pulled from the App Store due to the way an app behaves that is in violation of Apple’s terms and conditions for a submitted app.

Today I am going to share with you, three of the most hilarious Apps that somehow managed to find it’s way in through Apple’s (I assume highly guarded) approval process.

Some of these apps replicated functionality that is only available to Jailbroken iPhones, some just downright included something illegal. Here are three apps pulled from the Apple App Store.

These are of course in particular order;

1. HiddenApps

The App allowed users to temporarily hide Apple’s stock iOS apps, disable iAds and enter a Field Test mode that displays cellular reception strength in numerical form instead of the standard signal bars.

Some of these features were “Hide Apps” and “Disable all iAds”. When selecting “Hide Apps” the screen shows a number of built-in titles that can be hidden which included Calendar, Stocks, Passbook, Compass and more.

Source: Apple Insider

Usually this kind of ability to hide stock iOS apps is only available to Jailbroken iPhones and iPads, but for a brief period it was available to all stock non-jailbroken iPhones and iPads and unsurprisingly was pulled from the App Store.

2. Awesome Baby Names

This one is my own favourite, mainly due to the inconspicuous name; “Awesome Baby Names” which cleverly disguised itself as an app that randomly chose a first, middle and last name that as app suggest you could use as a baby name obviously.

Image Source: iDownloadBlog

But what you don’t see, until of course you head over to the developer’s own home page, he posted instructions to unlock an emulator, a Game Boy Advanced Emulator to be exact.

Image Source: iDownloadBlog

Now for reasons such as piracy and of course no legal ownership over ROMs that anyone could have downloaded and then used a program called iTools or even iFunBox that allows you to browse your iPhone Filesystem without jailbreaking.

And not surprisingly, it has also been pulled from the App Store, this time very swiftly indeed.

3. FlashArmyKnife

As with most other apps that have been pulled, this name does not really give anything away as to it’s true hidden abilities and that is to allow tethering, firstly the option to tether is no big issue these days, but how to achieve it is quite something else.

Let’s first talk about what else is included in this not so innocent app first, FlashArmyKnife combines about seven utilities including flashlight with adjustable brightness, built-in web browser with bookmarks, fully functional trigonometry calculator, satellite view map, currency converter, compass and battery indicator. All seems innocent right?

Until you get to the calculator within the app, according to iDownloadBlog all you had to do was punch in the following combination;

1642, M+, C, 1452, M+, C, 1943, M+

Image Source: iDownloadBlog

Once you’ve entered the combination successfully, the calculator should read “run”. This meant that tethering was now possible on HTTP port: 6667, SOCKS port: 6668 and to stop the tethering you just tap “C”

Overview

Things like this will never stop happening, as more and more developers are keen to find ways to sneak things into the App Store just for laughs most likely and to see where the loopholes are in Apple’s guarded development program which have essentially a strict control over what you can and can’t do.

Apple themselves though can never view the actual source code of an app itself, so this could also theoretically allow a developer to put in say a “time bomb” for an app to start doing after “x” date or time. Also given the amount of apps hitting the App Store, I could only imagine it to be very daunting task to view each and every single one, but still nonetheless, it is quite hilarious what can get pass Apple’s approval process.

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The post Apps Pulled From Apple App Store appeared first on Just Kevin.