Don’t Buy This iPhone Tethering App Before It Gets Pulled From The App Store

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Don't give this guy your money.
Don't give this guy your money.

Seriously, don’t. Why encourage the developer of this sneaky Trojan horse of an app when it’s only going to be pulled from the App Store, whether tonight, tomorrow, or on Monday? Paying $1.99 to a developer who’s fairly obviously hiding tethering features within a app isn’t the way to advocate for a loosening of the restrictions on such features.

The app, called DiscoRecorder, was released today by developer Michael Leatherbury. The screenshots uploaded to the App store (see above) show only a black and white skeuomorphic cassette tape recorder interface and some innocuous recorded voice memos. What the app really does is completely different.

As you can see in the video below, the app is really a way to sneak a restricted activity, tethering your iPhone, past the iTunes monitors. It’s most likely why this app was released this evening, right before a weekend. While it may remain on the store for a couple of days, it will be pulled. What’s the sense in encouraging this kind of app creation when it won’t remain available, and will most likely be blocked in an future iOS update?

As consumers of Apple’s devices and operating system, we would like to be able to do with them what we will. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. Apple has every right to block features and activities that it wishes to, and we have every right to complain about it, switch to Android, or jailbreak our iOS devices. But to pay someone to directly hack around the tethering restriction with a falsely advertised app is severely not cool, and doesn’t show much integrity on our part or on the part of the developer.

To keep this sort of stealth app out of the app store requires one thing only – that we refuse to purchase the app. That should send a clear message to the developer that we’re not willing to hide, sneak, and fake our way to a feature that we want clearly and legally.

Via: 9 to 5 Mac

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