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jlhandy

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 23, 2012
27
0
Los Angeles
The app was 'words with friends' I've only had the app on my phone for about 2 weeks, today I was wondering why I had no move notifications in the folder I store the app, It took me majority of my work day to finally go to the app and open the application when I noticed the app was gone completely from my phone... somehow it completely removed itself off my phone.

Has this happened to anyone else, not just with words with friends, but with any type of app? This has never happened to me before but I'm afraid it'll happen again.
 
App Store apps cannot remove themselves from iOS devices. The user must remove it either by deleting it from the device or by syncing it off via iTunes.
 
Apple does have a kill-switch ability to remove apps from your phone remotely but this is only done to protect a user if an app was discovered to be malicious and/or fraudulent. But I don't think in practice Apple has ever done that.

Was it the free or paid version? If there was a kill-switch activated against an app, it would affect all users. Mine's still there.

More likely though, it was removed when you synced your phone to your computer and selected to not transfer purchases.
 
Apple does have a kill-switch ability to remove apps from your phone remotely but this is only done to protect a user if an app was discovered to be malicious and/or fraudulent. But I don't think in practice Apple has ever done that.

The kill switch doesn't remove apps. It only disables their location services.
 
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No proof or statements from Apple have ever claimed that it deletes an offending application. There have been some tweets from some Dev-Team members when this first came out stating that they triggered it manually and it only rendered the application unlaunchable and did not delete it. Why don't you trigger it yourself to see what it does.
 
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No proof or statements from Apple have ever claimed that it deletes an offending application. There have been some tweets from some Dev-Team members when this first came out stating that they triggered it manually and it only rendered the application unlaunchable and did not delete it. Why don't you trigger it yourself to see what it does.

I don't think they've ever used the switch so who knows what it does. The first article clearly states it can delete apps but that could be just an assumption on their part. We knows SJ confirms that it existed but unless we see the exact wording of the question they asked him, we don't know what its capabilities are.

I wouldn't know how to activate it manually so nope. Maybe it's documented somewhere as to what it does but I don't feel like googling it.

This article uses the word "deactivate":

http://www.iphonehacks.com/2008/08/deactivate-apps.html

So who knows if it deletes it or simply prevents it from launching.
 
Make a proxy for your iOS device that points to "https://iphone-services.apple.com/clbl/unauthorizedApps". Add a self signed certificate for that page like you would add one for a Siri proxy. Then make the text of the page be something like this "{ "Date Generated" = "2011-10-26 22:04:09 Etc/GMT"; "BlackListedApps" = {com.bundle.id}; } ". Reboot your device and attempt to launch the app you blacklisted. It won't launch.
 
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