apple.ism

In an effort to clean up the App Store that has been growing ever more polluted each day, Apple now is getting rid of those apps that have ‘minimal functionality’ for the user. 

Wi-Fi scanner apps have now been removed by Apple for providing ‘minimal functionality’. The development studio, Three Jacks Software, had an app called “WiFi-Where” that has now been removed from the App Store. Along with this app are several other Wi-Fi scanners, including WifiTrak, WiFiFoFum, yFy Network Finder, WiFi Get, eWifi, and WiFi Analyzer.

The developer is not pleased with this absurd decision by Apple. He finds it ironic that Apple would remove these useful apps while there are so many other gimmick apps that have been and continue to pollute the Store. 

Three Jacks Software will be rereleasing their app for jailbroken iPhone users on the Cydia store. Earlier this week, Apple removed an app that simply made the iPhone quack like a duck. The reason for removal was ‘minimal functionality’.

It seems that Apple is continuing the purge the App Store, which began with removing more than 5,000 apps that contained “overtly sexual content’. An innocent app where it allowed users to purchase swimwear was a casualty in this purge, but was later corrected by Apple.

 It’s about time that Apple is cracking down on the crap in the App Store, but perhaps they’re cracking down too much?

It seems that internationally, the OTA download of apps on 3G has been doubled from 10MB to 20MB. This update seems to have been updated earlier in the week. The iTunes OTA limit of 12MB has also been updated to 20MB.

Ever since the acquisition of LaLa, Apple has been rolling out web-based previews for their iTunes products. Until today, there was only the web-based preview for music, leaving everyone that has an iPhone or iPod Touch behind without any web-based preview for iPhone apps.

Today they rolled it out for iPhone apps. Copying a link from the iTunes store and pasting it into a web browser will get you a page that looks like the screenshot above. 

You can view the icon, description of the app (clicking More... will expand the description), price, ratings, developer info, customer reviews, screenshots, and what other customers also bought at the bottom. However, clicking 'View more by this developer' will take you to iTunes.

Pretty functional web-based preview for iPhone apps, and this has been much needed, since people may be shopping for iPhone apps on a computer that does not have iTunes installed.