Apple removes Aurora Feint from App Store

The popular free RPG game Aurora Feint has been pulled from the App Store due to its Community feature. This feature lets you type in your email and phone number and it finds your contacts who are also playing the game and apparently this was a problem with Apple.

“When we discovered that the Apple SDK allowed us to look through your contact list we thought it would be a great idea to automatically show you which friends are playing the game. Why automatically? Well, everyone always complains about the keyboard on the iPhone and how annoying it is to type on it. So we thought, “Hey, why don’t we make this feature REALLY easy to use – no typing!” And such, the community feature was born. Some people have said that it would have been ok if we had a better notice explaining what was going on. I agree! We weren’t trying to be sneaky about how this worked. It was just overlooked. No one we showed it to even asked a question about it – nor did we. It just simply never came up as a potential issue when we beta tested the game with early users.”

Basically what this means is that Apple is worried about unencrypted data being sent to the wrong person or even worse the potential for someone receive spyware or something even worse through their iPhone. The developers have taken action and responsibility for their actions. They have released an updated version of the game to Apple that sends the information over HTTPS making it that much more secure. They are also working on a version of the game that does not include the community feature.

This is a big deal for me because I thought this would be the first true MMO on the iPhone. I thought the community feature had big potential but it appears that it will no longer be available. Still when Aurora Feint resurfaces in the App Store it will have new features and fix several known bugs in the app.

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