This time yesterday, Handy Light was a tethering app that had somehow miraculously slipped through Apple’s notorious vetting channels. How this happened nobody could work out, but it did. It took one day for Apple to bring its mighty fist down, and throw Nick Lee out of the app store, although those who got the tethering app have got it for good.
The app developer in question turned out to be 15 year old Nick Lee (according to Gizmodo), who’d designed an app that cost 99c, and appeared to allow you to turn your phone into a multi coloured flashlight.
How Lee managed to get word out that the app could in fact provide tethering is not yet clear, but as soon as the story broke, it was only a matter of time until that flashlight tethering app was permanently exiled from the app store.
To use tethering through the app, you needed to configure an ad-hoc wireless network, connect the iPhone, fiddle with some settings, launch the tethering/flashlight app, and then tap a top secret code of colours. And as if by magic, free iPhone tethering was yours.
That’s why Apple never saw it – the complex process you could tether by was in a fiddly set of instructions. Nevertheless, as soon as the real purpose of the tethering app leaked, the app was pulled, in around 24 hours in fact, although if you downloaded the disguised iphone tethering app, you’ll be able to carry on using it.
Disguised like this, tethering made it into the app store, which raises the possibility that other functions previously only possible via a jailbreak could creep into the app store under the cover of simple apps.
Did you get hold of 15 year old Nick Lee’s iPhone tethering app in time, or are you frantically downloading the worst apps you can find in the hope they contain some hidden code? Tell us in the comments!
