Nullriver releases / Apple nixes iPhone 3g tethering app
Late last night, developer Nullriver’s iPhone 3g tethering app NetShare was released onto the App Store.
It lasted about an hour before it was pulled from the US App Store by Apple, likely at the behest of AT&T.
Tethering allows you to connect your laptop to your phone and surf the internet on your laptop using your phone as a data modem. This is a pretty standard feature on a lot of smartphones, and I used to tether my laptop to my Blackberry quite frequently. The lack of tethering on the iPhone has been one of the small reasons why I’ve been holding off on buying one, hoping that indeed someone would release an easy to use app in the app store that would provide that functionality.
So needless to say, I was happy it was released, and then extremely disappointed when it was pulled.
The developer sent a response about the app’s removal to MacRumors:
We’re not quite sure why Apple took down the application yet, we’ve received no communication from Apple thus far. NetShare did not violate any of the Developer or AppStore agreements. We’re hoping we’ll get some feedback from Apple tomorrow. Sorry to all the folks that couldn’t get it in time. We’ll do our best to try to get the application back onto the AppStore if at all possible. At the very least, I would hope Apple will allow it in countries where the provider does permit tethering.
So it looks as if the developer wasn’t even notified that it was going to be removed. In fact, it’s really strange that it made it through onto the App Store in the first place.
I’ve spoken to a few developers whom I won’t name, who without giving me a lot of details (f-ing NDA), told me that it TECHNICALLY is legal to create a tethering app for the iPhone according to the rules of the SDK. So chances are this is something that AT&T had a problem with.
I honestly don’t see what the big deal is. It’s not like people are going to use the 3g data from the phone as a main ISP. They wont be downloading bit torrents or anything like that. It’s just that sometimes, when there’s no wifi around, I might need to upload a file from my laptop to my FTP, or to Flickr. Is that really such a big deal?
The iPhone’s web browser is just fine for most information searching, so I’d use tethering pretty rarely. But having it would be absolutely fantastic.
How about it AT&T, can we have it back?
Pretty Please?