Camera+, a popular iPhone app developed by tap tap tap has been removed from the App Store.
Apple seems to have removed the iPhone app after the developer revealed a hack to enable a hidden feature, which allowed iPhone users to use the volume buttons as a camera shutter button that is against Apple’s iPhone Developer Program License Agreement.
Couple of days back, tap tap tap had revealed that they had sold over 400,000 iPhone apps and had generated more than $500,000 in the first two months since it was released.
However, yesterday they revealed that it was possible to enable the VolumeSnap feature by entering “camplus://enablevolumesnap” without the quotation marks in mobile Safari.
This was quite cheeky of tap tap tap as Apple had already rejected an update to the iPhone app that included the feature.
At that time, Apple’s reason for the rejection was as follows:
Your application cannot be added to the App Store because it uses iPhone volume buttons in a non-standard way, potentially resulting in user confusion. Changing the behavior of iPhone external hardware buttons is a violation of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement. Applications must adhere to the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines as outlined in the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement section 3.3.7.
As expected, as soon as the news of the hidden feature made its way to the tech blogs, Apple removed the iPhone app from the App Store. If you try to purchase the iPhone app from the App Store, you get the error message: “The item you tried to buy is no longer available”.
Though the idea of using the volume buttons as a camera shutter button is a good one, trying to sneak the feature when it was rejected by Apple seems to be a short-sighted move by a prominent developer like tap tap tap.
We’re assuming that tap tap tap will remove the feature and resubmit their iPhone app for approval. Let’s just hope Apple approves it and doesn’t decide to ban it for this prank.
We’ll keep you updated on this developing story so stay tuned here at iPhone Hacks or follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our RSS feed.
[via MobileCrunch]
