My story of creating an antivirus began when I was my 3rd year student at a nice university in the United Kingdom. I was keen to see if I am able to develop a nice app that can help Mac users.
So here it goes... after 1 year of research and coding I managed to finish the first version of Thor Antivirus. I was so happy that actually the app was doing good things for Macs.
I manage to put it on sale on the Mac AppStore and in a few months it was one of the top sold antivirus solution with thousands of users and 4,5 stars reviews ratings.
Customers were happy and were sending me emails to thank for the great app I had.
This can be seen in the screenshot:
Seen that everything goes well I started to hire some personnel in order to get help and improve the solution.
Few days ago Apple removed the Thor Antivirus from the AppStore, leaving more then 80000+ users who already bought this app without the ability to use our app.
Here are the "good" Apple reasons why they removed our app from sale:
Hello,
We are writing to let you know about new information regarding your app.
Upon re-evaluation, we found that your app is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines. Specifically, we found:
Safety - 1.1.6
The app misleads users to think that it detects malware and viruses.
Design - 4.3
The app duplicates the content and functionality of the other apps you have submitted to the App Store.
For these reasons, your app will be removed from sale on the App Store at this time.
So now let's detail the "good" reasons:
Safety - 1.1.6 - If this is true how come that we had so many happy customers that were writing on the AppStore the good experience they had with our app.
More of we made a video tutorial:
Showing that Thor is able to detect most of the recent malware that are in the wild.
More of that, why Apple employers are still using our app even after it was removed from the AppStore?
Design - 4.3 - Apple is accusing that we are duplicate the content of other apps we had already had submitted on the Mac AppStore.
We had for sale on the Mac AppStore the following apps:
1. Thor Antivirus - full paid version
2. Thor Antivirus Lite - free version with which users were able to remove most of the adware and PUPs found
3. Thor Adware Cleaner - free version which with users could easy clear their browser from rogue extensions and inside adware
We don't say that the full version of Thor Antivirus didn't had all the features from the free apps, but we took this decision in order to help people who don't want to pay for an app. More of that there are many other developers on the AppStore who are using same scheme to promote app and provide free solutions for adware and browser clean.
In conclusion we think that Apple is choosing who should sell and who should not on their platform without any professional way of doing that.
In our opinion the lack of information, bogus reasons for which they removed our apps are showing not more than an unprofessional way of doing business from the Apple side.
At the moment of writing this article, Thor Antivirus is still removed, if we will not be accepted on the AppStore I will have to close our business and send home the hired personal...
Thank you Apple for destroying a future business.
With warm regards,
Amelia Dybala
Just a simple Cocoa developer
So here it goes... after 1 year of research and coding I managed to finish the first version of Thor Antivirus. I was so happy that actually the app was doing good things for Macs.
I manage to put it on sale on the Mac AppStore and in a few months it was one of the top sold antivirus solution with thousands of users and 4,5 stars reviews ratings.
Customers were happy and were sending me emails to thank for the great app I had.
This can be seen in the screenshot:
Seen that everything goes well I started to hire some personnel in order to get help and improve the solution.
Few days ago Apple removed the Thor Antivirus from the AppStore, leaving more then 80000+ users who already bought this app without the ability to use our app.
Here are the "good" Apple reasons why they removed our app from sale:
Hello,
We are writing to let you know about new information regarding your app.
Upon re-evaluation, we found that your app is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines. Specifically, we found:
Safety - 1.1.6
The app misleads users to think that it detects malware and viruses.
Design - 4.3
The app duplicates the content and functionality of the other apps you have submitted to the App Store.
For these reasons, your app will be removed from sale on the App Store at this time.
So now let's detail the "good" reasons:
Safety - 1.1.6 - If this is true how come that we had so many happy customers that were writing on the AppStore the good experience they had with our app.
More of we made a video tutorial:
Showing that Thor is able to detect most of the recent malware that are in the wild.
More of that, why Apple employers are still using our app even after it was removed from the AppStore?
Design - 4.3 - Apple is accusing that we are duplicate the content of other apps we had already had submitted on the Mac AppStore.
We had for sale on the Mac AppStore the following apps:
1. Thor Antivirus - full paid version
2. Thor Antivirus Lite - free version with which users were able to remove most of the adware and PUPs found
3. Thor Adware Cleaner - free version which with users could easy clear their browser from rogue extensions and inside adware
We don't say that the full version of Thor Antivirus didn't had all the features from the free apps, but we took this decision in order to help people who don't want to pay for an app. More of that there are many other developers on the AppStore who are using same scheme to promote app and provide free solutions for adware and browser clean.
In conclusion we think that Apple is choosing who should sell and who should not on their platform without any professional way of doing that.
In our opinion the lack of information, bogus reasons for which they removed our apps are showing not more than an unprofessional way of doing business from the Apple side.
At the moment of writing this article, Thor Antivirus is still removed, if we will not be accepted on the AppStore I will have to close our business and send home the hired personal...
Thank you Apple for destroying a future business.
With warm regards,
Amelia Dybala
Just a simple Cocoa developer
