Aurora Feint Removed from App Store

App Store We have not done a review of Aurora Feint however, it is a game that I have on my iPhone and actually really enjoyed…as did many of you based on the emailed we received. Well, it seems that Apple has pulled Aurora Feint from the App Store due to the fact that it searches through the contact list on your iPhone and then sends your contact’s information unencrypted to their servers – very not cool. Below is a snippet from an article Gizmodo wrote last night.

Remember that Aurora Feint Puzzle/RPG game that we told you we liked? Turns out we don’t like it anymore. In fact, we’re actually pretty damn scared of this app, seeing as Apple de-listed them from the App Store due to privacy and security issues. To the developer’s credit, they were forthright with what they did and didn’t do.

According to their forums, if you opt-in to the community feature, Aurora Feint looks through your contact list, sends it unencrypted to their servers, and matches you up with your friends who are currently playing right now. Great feature, for sure, but that whole looking through our contact list and sending it in plain text to your server is cause for us to go OMGWTFBBQ.

“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.”

Upside is, if you didn’t use the community feature, you’re OK.

Read the rest of this article HERE.

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Comments

  1. what a ridiculous “excuse”

    • what’s ridiculous is that you failed to see it was an innocent mistake.

    • yea yea… They were in a rush, no time left for encryption, they didn’t see any harm in sharing peoples important and privilaged data… Ridiculous!

  2. I don’t even have any contacts, so dosn’t matter to me.

    BTW: I love this game! (It needs a tutorial though)

  3. I partly agree with TJ, my contacts list is small at the moment, and I don’t use the community feature, so I don’t feel violated whatsoever. This game is really a joy to play, and I anticipate once they can get the bugs out we’ll be seeing this back in the app store in no time. Especially if they can encrypt the data they’re pushing to and from the device.

    If you’ve never had the chance to play it, you’re definitely missing out though, this game was innovative and fun while adding splendid elements of depth that made it’s price-tag of “Free” absolutely perfect.

  4. To err is Human…

    I believe them….it sounds like a great feature to me

  5. I definitely keep a few things in my contact list that nobody should see, but maybe I should move them out of there! Time to try some of those encryption apps.

  6. It’s back up! Everyone download it now!!! :D

    lol – you must be connected to wifi or download it on the iTunes store, so it is freaking huge haha