The App iTether was perminently pulled from the Apple App Store. Apple claimed the tethering app “burdened carriers”. Now I love Apple to death.. But who has the strong hand here? Unless the Phone Carriers have Apple by the neck, why would Apple care? I mean it was Apple who approved the App right?? No hackers got in and set this app to approved status and released it into the wild… personally I think this is CRAP! I use WAYYYYY more data just browsing the internet and streaming netflix and stuff on my phone. Do you think that would change and just sky high if I could tether through this app?? Not exactly… I have the Wifi HOTSPOT capability through Verizon and I hardly use all my data. Let me know what you think! Check out the statement put out by Tether.com…
“Around 12PM EST, Apple called our head office to let us know they were going to go ahead and pull our app iTether from the App Store. They stated it was because the app itself burdens the carrier network, however they offered us no way to remedy the solution… We were very clear when listing the app what the primary function was and they even followed up with several questions and requested a video demo then they approved the application.
We strongly disagree that it burdens a carrier’s network, as from our own data history on more than 500,000 users we know the average user consumes less than 200 MBs of data per month on Tether. In comparison, one TV show streamed from Netflix, an approved Apple App, could easily be in the 300-400 MBs range. Sure, there are some users that will consume way more than the average however that’s the case with any of these types of products.
Our team is very disappointed in Apple’s decision; as we strongly believe we help carriers better monetize their data stream by pushing customers into new data tiers further increasing their bottom-line. It is very anti-competitive to not allow any Tethering application to enter into this space to innovate. Our team has created a lot of innovative solutions for the BlackBerry product, which we were hoping to port over to the iPhone like end-to-end encryption, compression, website filtering and port filtering.
According to Apple, users who purchase iTether before it was pulled will continue to be able to use the product.
Our team is evaluating all of our options… Stay tuned.”
BLAHHHHH Stupid Approvals!!!
-Dom
