Yesterday Apple approved an innocent-looking flashlight app which contained a hidden tethering feature. Needless to say, as soon as Apple found out about it, they pulled the app.
I’ll admit, it was a brilliant feature and I bought the app while it was still available. If you weren’t lucky enough to get Handy Light, iProxy is available at github, which will do exactly the same thing without masquerading as a flashlight app.
As a result of this deception, Apple seems to be a lot more cautious and taking more time to review apps, as reported by several developers on Twitter and the iPhone SDK mailing list. I only submitted Removr yesterday, but it’s still “waiting for review” 24 hours later. Most of the time it was less than an hour waiting for review before it changed to “In Review”.
During beta testing, I had a feature in Removr which checked my server for updated level maps. I was doing very careful version & timestamp checking and could either run SQL code to insert or modify levels or replace the entire level database. I removed that feature for the release version because I was afraid Apple would reject it if they discovered it.