The App Store's walled garden feels more fragile by the day in recent months. First, Apple had to allow 3rd party stores onto iPhones thanks to a court order in the EU, and then a movie and TV piracy app crept its way onto the actual App Store somehow.
Apple soon removed the app, but it showed chinks in the otherwise presumably very secure app vetting process that Apple has going on with its app installing storefront. It looks like you can’t keep a pirate down, however, as 9to5Mac has found two more apps that have managed to sneak past the filters and settle in the App Store.
Ar, fortune rides the shoulders of them what schemes
The apps in question come in the form of two different close to identical apps. Both are called ‘Collect Cards’, although the two have different subheadings: One ‘Birthday Check’, and one ‘Sugar’. Whatever that means. Not much, apparently, given that the screenshots of the apps are almost exactly the same.
Install the apps, however, and you’ll soon find neither has anything to do with collecting cards, birthday checks, or sugar — instead, there are pages upon pages of different movies and TV shows that are, one would assume, pirated. There’s certainly no license for any of them to be there, that’s for sure.
Why have these apps made it to the App Store? Like the previous pirate app, they appear to be sneaking in by making themselves look like something innocuous, only to install and become something altogether more nefarious. Apple will likely step in at some point to remove the apps from the App Store as it did with the previous app, but as yet we don’t know if anything is being done to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. Given that these apps come the same way as the previous, however, tells us that nothing has been done to stop it from happening.
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