Apps disappear from digital stores all the time, and for all sorts of reasons. Developers might decide it’s not in their best interest to continue supporting new operating systems, a company might break up due to financial problems, and so on. But sometimes it’s for other reasons. Stranger reasons.
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Here are five different apps that Apple has tried to remove from the iOS App Store over the years for a variety of reasons. Seriously, they range from intentionally wasting obscene amounts of money to personal disputes between corporations. Not all of the apps themselves are weird (although some are), and not all of them ever posed a real risk or threat to anyone. But they all have one thing in common: They’re no longer on the App Store due to direct intervention from Apple. And it’s highly unlikely that any of them will ever come back.
Fortnite
While Fortnite isn’t a particularly strange app in and of itself — in that a game where Optimus Prime can fight LEGO Luke Skywalker alongside Goku is a perfectly normal thing — the reason for the app’s removal from the iOS App Store is a bit unusual.
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Most iPhone users were able to enjoy Fortnite without any issues for a while, but then the legal battle between Apple and Epic Games broke out. When the dust settled on this lengthy legal battle, Apple banned Epic’s moneymaker from all of its mobile devices, in what many see as retaliation.
Thanks to game streaming services like cloud gaming through Xbox Game Pass, there are other ways to play “Fortnite” on an iPhone, but it doesn’t look like Epic’s official game app will be returning to the App Store anytime soon — if ever. Until then, players will have to switch to another platform or find an internet service provider with very fast and stable speeds for streaming.
I am rich
“I Am Rich” was a strange app even for its time, and that was a long time ago when the App Store – and the mobile app market as a whole – was still trying to establish itself. The app itself did nothing. Or at least almost nothing. When you launched the app, an image of a red gem appeared on the screen and that was it. Tapping the gem displayed the message: “I am rich, I deserve it, I am good, healthy and successful” – with no other features or purpose.
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However, it wasn’t the lack of anything that made “I Am Rich” the target of an Apple shutdown. It was the $1,000 price tag. For an app that does nothing except display a single image and show a few misspelled confirmations when you tap on it.
Perhaps most bizarre is the idea that the app was purchased by eight people when it was still available, and six of them decided to keep it after the initial $1,000 purchase. But whether they didn’t ask Apple for a refund because they really wanted to keep the app or because they didn’t know that option existed is unclear.
Driver’s license
Apple’s reasoning for banning Driver’s License is not really due to perceived competition, even though it is possible to store your driver’s license in Apple Wallet in certain US states. No, Driver’s License was shut down back in 2011 due to rather questionable real-world applications.
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Anyone using the app could take or import a photo and insert it into a digital version of a driver’s license from any U.S. state. This meant that someone could create a fake ID fairly easily, which caught the U.S. government’s attention.
Of course, a digital image on a phone is no replacement for the physical card, which itself is chock-full of verification tricks. The problem is that it doesn’t help much in situations where all that’s needed is a photo of an ID. And most people who’ve worked in customer service can probably imagine (or even remember) a scenario where someone tried to use a picture of a driver’s license as a valid ID. Scams like this are the kind of thing no one wants to mess around with, so naturally Apple shut it down.
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Tawkon radiation detector
The purpose of the Tawkon Radiation Detector was (allegedly) to collect data from a number of iPhone sensors to determine what radiation the device was exposing people to. The developer claimed that the app was able to determine a given phone’s specific absorption rate (SAR), which measures the rate of absorption of radio frequency energy by the human body. So naturally, Apple would ban an app that could cast its hardware in a bad light.
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However, this isn’t some grand conspiracy where Apple is hiding a dangerous truth from the public. Yes, smartphones do emit radiation, but so far there’s no evidence that the radio frequency energy emitted by smartphones causes cancer or other health problems. And yes, France temporarily banned the iPhone 12 due to radiation concerns, but the problem was the way the SAR testing protocols had changed, not that the iPhone 12 was some kind of pocket-sized demon core.
Send me to heaven
Despite the name, Send Me To Heaven is actually a very simple game where the goal is to get a high score. While the app does not contain any malware or pose a direct risk that could alter your iPhone security settings, it does pose a risk of another kind, much like attempts to trick users into putting their devices in the microwave or the iOS 7 waterproofing scam.
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The app is designed to record the iPhone’s maximum height and compare the numbers to an online leaderboard. In other words, it’s trying to get users to see who can throw their expensive smartphone the highest into the air. Technically, that might not be an unavoidable risk if someone is confident they can catch it on the way down, but there was definitely a lot of potential for people to smash their phones.
This is all intentional, as the app’s developer admitted in a 2013 interview (via Wired) that the goal was to get people to destroy their phones. Although the app was surprisingly accurate at measuring how high an iPhone was thrown, it existed solely to cause destruction. And Apple was (understandably) not very happy about it.
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