Tales Of The App Store: Apple Kills AirPlay Receiver Apps [u]

As of last night, the internet was aflame from the tale of Apple removing Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil Speakers Touch from the App Store, even though it had been successfully there for years. On the official company blog, Paul Kafasis stated:

Today, we’ve been informed that Apple has removed Airfoil Speakers Touch from the iOS App Store. We first heard from Apple about this decision two days ago, and we’ve been discussing the pending removal with them since then. However, we still do not yet have a clear answer on why Apple has chosen to remove Airfoil Speakers Touch. Needless to say, we’re quite disappointed with their decision, and we’re working hard to once again make the application available for you, our users.

But with a hat tip to John Gruber’s incredible digging, it looks like some recently added functionality stepped on Apple’s toes. It appears that the application recently added functionality to make it act like an AirPlay receiver, which Apple is apparently not a fan of. Bearing this out, another similar App was killed earlier this month.

But what’s really frustrating is that Apple hasn’t mentioned this at all, meaning we’re all scrabbling about to figure out what has roused the sleeping giant this time.

UPDATE: Apple has confirmed it was an improper use of APIs