Spammer’s 1000 Apps Banned from the App Store – What’s Apple Up To?

While the whole smart phone industry - which also includes every single iPhone developer as well as user, is up in arms about Apple voting off the Google Voice app from the App Store, the company has been working on throwing out nearly hundred applications, which it consider to be of no use from its application storefront. Despite of the fact that the Apple’s App Store received more than 1.5 billion downloads over the past year – according to Apple there are quite a few applications that are largely useless and are unworthy of getting a place in the store. Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has taken this issue quite seriously and has taken action accordingly.

The company gas pulled 943 apps from Khalid Shaikh, one of the well-known notorious iPhone developer. Apple accused the app-spammer to be unable to secure copyrights, trademarks and contents, which he pushed through his many iPhone applications. The company further said that all of Shaikh’s apps are in fact rip-offs and are essentially content aggregators. The applications basically collect articles on a specific topic and serve that content to the iPhone users. Khalid, tried to fool people into buying apps by charging $4.99 rather than $0.99. According to him “less product value” is a trade-off that furthers “more monetization”. The racket that Shaikh created came to an abrupt end when Apple revoked its iPhone Developer Program License Agreement after receiving too many complaints about copyright violation issues.

On one hand people are quite happy to see an app-spammer like Khalid being banned from the store, but on the other hand Apple’s decision of banning a developer who has been publishing nearly thousand applications has raised a more serious question among iPhone developers. Why did Apple in the first place, approve so many applications that do just a little more than aggregate online contents? Well, nobody actually can say what Apple had in mind while approving these apps. But, whatever the reason maybe, Apple certainly needs to revamp its policies for controlling the App Store and bring some changes in their application approval process.