A billion apps. Developers getting rich. Apple making a bit of money. Or is it all just a house of cards ready to come tumbling down, with only one sneaky developer and a rule-breaking easter egg to blame?
See, the App Store has rules. You can’t, for example, include porn in an application and expect it to get approved and hosted by Apple in the App Store. But lets say your app looks all sweet and interesting, gets approved by Apple, and then lets slip that with one little gesture or secret code — porn. Or worse, malware or other malicious code.
Sound crazy? Wired (via Ars) tells us it’s already happened, albeit with language in an app called Lyrics.
Seems the app had some language that caused Apple to reject it, so the dev applied a language filter to clean that **** up, but added in a stealthy way to swipe the About screen to re-enable it. Said developer Jelle Prins:
“It’s almost impossible for Apple to see if there’s an Easter egg because they can’t really see the source code. In theory a developer could make a simple Easter egg in their app and provide a user with whatever content they want.”
Until Apple reads that quote, begins scouring apps even more closely, maybe asking developers to submit the actual code base, and making current app approval delays look like the blink of an eye.
Geniuses the lot of you.
