In the past two weeks we have seen two scams that have lead to many people paying $0.99-$1.99 thinking that these are real jailbreak tweaks brought to the App Store. Well those two were “Cydia” and “DisplayRecorder”. The former known as Cydia after installation did not actually give you the Cydia as we know it but it gave you the snake (worm) game that you played when you were young (no offense to those who still play it 
). Saurik sprung into action and immediately contacted the App Store authorities and the app was taken down from the App Store.
Just few days prior to Cydia another app was seen calling itself “DisplayRecorder” and mind you it is still present in the App Store for $1.99. This app claims to do what Ryan Petrich’s jailbreak tweak with the same name (DisplayRecorder) did. I don’t know how far it is true since I was not going to spend $1.99 to check what it does, but reviews suggest it is legit and does what it is supposed to do, but that is not the point. The point is some rookie developer is takes Ryan’s idea, writes a simple app on it and submits it to the App Store. The app breaks the sand box and infringes copyright material, so do not expect it to be in the App Store for long.
And guess what? Today there showed up another app in the App Store which is a copy of another Ryan Petrich jailbreak app – Activator. This app is priced at $0.99 in the App Store and here is what it is supposed to do according to the description in the App Store:
50% Off Limited Time ! Enjoy the new content! Download NOW!! DOWNLOAD BEFORE THE PRICE GOES UP! Finally you can customize “”ACTIVATOR”" for your iPhone, iPod Touch ! This will answer one or more of your heaps of problems with your iPhone … Such as… How to use multitouch gestures in iPhone/iPod touch How to change the way of accessing IPhone/iPod touch How to assume custom buttons or custom gestures for original buttons With this you can add new features like “shaking the iPod for traditional home button press) like wise.. There are many features like touch screen lock, touch shut down, touch reboot, touch respiring, changing default buttons and changing default gestures….
Well after reading this many people will think that this is the real deal, but after downloading the app you will come to know it is fake. Oh and you know what? The screenshots of the app in the App Store are also the ones taken from the jailbreak app Activator. This is total scam. The app does nothing of that sort but actually is a puny little app which provides you with new wallpapers and icon shelves and useless stuff like that.
Here are some real screenshots of the app:
In one of Apple’s keynotes and at an AllThingsD conference Steve Jobs talked about why some apps were rejected from being placed in the App Store. The three main reasons that he told us were:
- The use of private APIs
- The app does not do what it advertises
- The app is buggy
In this case we can clearly see that two aforementioned apps do not abide by the second rule. So why did Apple approve them in the first place? Well I can’t answer that but there is something going wrong on Apple’s end which needs to be fixed before more scams like these show up.
Another app that I found affected by this is Easy Measure. If you search Cydia for it, you will see it is a paid tweak hosted by the ModMyi repo. And now if you search the App Store, you will see the same app for free. The interesting thing is that, there is no catch in this but both, the Cydia version as well as the App Store version work exactly the same leading to a conclusion that both use the same code.
Until then I should tell you that, any app in the App Store that claims to do something like what a jailbreak app/tweak does, believe me it is fake and should not be downloaded.
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