Apple Chucks Anti-Hacker Tool From App Store After Just One Week

Apple has removed an app that helped customers hunt down hidden hackers on their iPhones, just a week after it appeared on the marketplace.

The 'System and Security Info' application, from German firm SektionEins, picked up on various anomalies, including any unsolicited tinkering with certificates supposed to guarantee the legitimacy of applications, and use of files associated with certain jailbreaks. Such jailbreaks can be carried out without the user's knowledge to remove many of the security protections provided by Apple. The app, according to SektionEins founder Stefan Esser, was also the only one on Apple's App Store capable of listing all processes happening on the device.

But despite all those benefits, Apple removed the application. Last week, Esser told FORBES the app was able to recover all processes because Apple hadn't done what it had promised; in 2015, the Cupertino giant said it would lock down particular application programming interfaces (APIs) – slices of code allowing outside access to certain functions – to prevent malware from accessing other apps. It didn't quite succeed, Esser said, meaning his app had broad visibility across iOS activities.

Esser was unsure if that was what peeved Apple, however. "It could be that some of the things we use they cannot fix in [iOS] 9.3.2 because they are too late in the release cycle. So leaving our app in the store would make it very visible that they might not intend to fix the problems before iOS 10 which comes out in months," he told FORBES. He said the app had gone through three separate reviews before appearing on the App Store last week.

Apple didn't provide the app developer with many specifics on why the software had been removed, according to Esser. He told FORBES a colleague had received a call from Apple, in which it raised privacy concerns about the gathering of iOS processes. On Twitter , the expert iOS hacker posted some of Apple's official correspondence in which it explained the app had been removed for two reasons: first, it appeared to provide "inaccurate and misleading diagnostic functionality", and second, it contained "false, fraudulent or misleading representations" or used "names or icons similar to other apps."

An app appeared on 14 May, a matter of days after the SektionEins, with exactly the same name, offering similar features. Esser believes the developer copied the name and is "trying to get sales from our name."

This is just priceless: pic.twitter.com/0kvdSUWfLG

— Stefan Esser (@i0n1c) May 14, 2016

"Considering that there are hundreds of system information tools in the App Store that show diagnostics and some of them like battery monitors show information they can only gather via private APIs, one has to wonder why they pull only us and not every single one of those. It feels like Apple is just taking an arbitrary rule to remove only us from the store, because they dislike our content," Esser added.

This isn't the first time Apple has caused controversy by removing a security or privacy-focused application. In 2012, it killed the Clueful app, which sought to highlight privacy-invading iOS software, from Romanian security outfit Bitdefender.