In a rare gesture of openness, Apple has revealed data about iPhone application sales and confirmed the existence of a "kill switch" to disable malicious applications.
CEO
Steve Jobs told the Wall Street Journal that the iPhone's App Store has sold 60 million applications, or two million downloads a day, since its launch one month ago. Altogether this netted about $30 million in revenue
(which means that for every one of the eight copies of I Am Rich, Apple probably shifted plenty of freebies, too.) Apple took a relatively modest 30 percent of the pie, or just enough to cover credit card processing fees, Jobs said.
Whichever way you cut it, that's a lot of apps, even if, as Gigaom's Om Malik suggests, people aren't actually using most of those applications.
Even more interesting, though, is the strangely open and forthcoming answer Jobs gave when asked about the remote kill switch for iPhone applications. He confirmed that it is indeed possible for
Apple to reach into your phone from afar and disable malicious applications.
"Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull," he told the WSJ.
An example of a malicious application would be one that stole users'
personal information, Jobs explained.
While it's comforting to know that a harmful application can be immediately purged from all iPhones at the press of a button, it's a little worrying, too. Given the level of secrecy inside Apple, some have speculated the company could use "malicious" as a blanket term to disable any applications as it so pleases.
The application that immediately comes to mind is NetShare, which violates
AT&T's Terms of Service agreements by turning your iPhone into a wireless modem for laptop tethering. Apple removed NetShare from the
App Store shortly after it appeared in the App Store, and this ban is most likely permanent since Apple is reviewing user contracts with AT&T.
The question arises: What about all the people who downloaded the app before its disappearance -- users who will continue violating
AT&T's TOS?
Then there is the question of how exactly Apple will determine which applications are "malicious."
We have a picture in our heads of some kind of virtual Guantanamo Bay inside
One Infinite Loop, where bad applications are kept locked up indefinitely and tortured to find their secrets.
"Oh, you like phishing, do you?" the ex-CIA interrogator will ask as he tips the imprisoned code back on a board and reaches for a bucket of water. "Then why don't you take a SWIM?" he'll shout, up-ending the bucket on the victim's face.
