In what may go down as the most significant App Store clean sweep in its brief one year history, Apple has banned developer Khalid Shaikh, founder of Perfect Acumen along with all 943 of his mostly useless apps. Khalid Shaikh was given the tragic notice by Apple via email back on July 24th. Shaikh alleges that he received no advance notice or forewarning when Apple revoked his developer license and asked him to remove all of his apps from
the App Store immediately.
"This letter serves as notice of termination of the iPhone Developer
Program License Agreement (the “iDP Agreement”) and the Registered
iPhone Developer Agreement (the “Registered Developer Agreement”)
between you and Apple, effective immediately."
Communication from Apple cites numerous third party intellectual property complaints concerning over 100 of Khalid Shaikh's Applications, making it painfully clear that the company no longer intends to chase those complaints on behalf of the embattled developer. Resulting in his iPhone developer license being revoked.
"We continue to receive the same or similar types of complaints
regarding your Applications despite our repeated notices to you. The
persistent nature of such complaints has led us to conclude that you
are entering into the representations and warranties in the iDP
Agreement in bad faith by misrepresenting that you have all the
necessary rights for your submissions."
Mobile Crunch has an in depth report highlighting that Khalid Shaikh, along with his 26-employee team (most of which are in Pakistan) have published a total of 943 applications, which amounts to roughly 5 apps a day, every day, for 250 days. This level of production, referred to as App Spamming, was produced in less than 9 months.
Shaikh's apps include such epic titles as iYorkie ($4.99), iRihanna ($4.99), Tupac Quotes ($4.99) and Miley Cyrus Updates ($4.99) to name only a few, along with dozens of applications that featured the name and likeness of many top celebrities.
This latest move by Apple aimed at one of the App Store’s most prolific developers of questionable iPhone apps is bound to stir up a tsunami of controversy, certain to fill Mac forums with chatter for weeks to come. Once again placing the flawed App Store review processes at the center of this fast moving storm. In the immortal words of Phil Collins and Genesis; "I can feel it coming in the air tonight. Hold on!"
[Mobile Crunch] [Complete list of Khalid Shaikh apps]
It seems that Mobile Crunch lacks basic math skills: my 7-year old noticed that their calculations for the amount of apps Khalid Shaikh produced were wrong. 5 x 250 = 1250 (they produced 943 according to the article), it's more like 3.75 per day. Maybe my kid can get a job as a fact checker for MC.
Posted by: Dadeo | September 10, 2009 at 05:50 PM
I agree, I wonder how did this person get away with the application process? But this is a good start for Apple to check all of the developers who violate copyrights and other policies.
-Andy
Posted by: Andy | August 04, 2009 at 08:37 PM
Looking through this guy's list of apps, it's no wonder he was shut down. All kinds of copyright issues popped out. NFL football team apps, celebs and movie icons. Please!
Apple has some explaining to do green lighting all of these apps and waiting until over 900 to pull the plug. At $4.99 each for many of the titles this dude may already have grabbed a small fortune.
Posted by: jamesQ | August 04, 2009 at 05:03 PM