I remember the first time I heard about Khalid Shaikh, he was making a killing off the Apple App Store. His 26 employee team based in Pakistan were delivering Apple applications at a fast pace.
The reason why Shaikh was making a killing was that he had 900 useless applications listed on the iTunes App Store.
But Apple decided to revoke Shaikh’s license and the company is banned from making further applications.
Shaikh’s whole business model for his company called Perfect Acumen has been shot down and Apple helps curb spam from entering their App Store at the same time.
In less than 6 months, Perfect Acumen published 943 applications on the App Store, putting it at an average of 5 applications approved every day for 250 days. All of the applications had to go through Apple’s approval process which took up to 6 weeks for some of them to get approved.
Shaikh made a few thousand dollars every day as a result of having a high quantity of applications spread amongst the App Store.
On July 24, Shaikh was officially banned without advanced notice. However, Apple did send Shaikh a copyright infringement notice regarding his applications.
Shaikh submitted content to which he did not have the rights for. Over 100 of Shaikh’s applications had some sort of infrigement violation.
Shaikh’s average cost of his applications were around $4.99. Some of them would just be news feeds aggregated from various sources about a particular topic such as Skin Care Updates, Top Sexy Ladies: Audrina Partridge, and WWE Updates.
The Audrina Partridge application had 5 pictures of the celebrity from a website and it costed $4.99 to download.
There were hundreds of similar applications Shaikh’s company submitted with similar functionality causing outrage amongst the Apple developer community.
Brighthouse Labs is another company that is submitting tons of applications every day. Brighthouse has over 2,000 applications on the iTunes App Store that are just as bad as Perfect Acumen.
The rejection letter sent to Shaikh is pasted below via MobileCrunch.
From:
Date: Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 4:45 PM
Subject: Notice of Termination
To: XXXXXXXXX@gmail.com
Please include the line below in follow-up emails for this request.
Follow-up: 79376777
July 24, 2009
Khalid Shaikh
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXX, California 9XXXX
Dear Mr. Shaikh:
This letter serves as notice of termination of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement (the “iDP Agreement”) and the Registered iPhone Developer Agreement (the “Registered Developer Agreement”) between you and Apple, effective immediately.
Pursuant to Section 3.2(d) of the iDP Agreement, you agreed that “to the best of Your knowledge and belief, Your Application and Licensed Application Information do not and will not violate, misappropriate, or infringe any Apple or third party copyrights, trademarks, rights of privacy and publicity, trade secrets, patents, or other proprietary or legal rights (e.g. musical composition or performance rights, video rights, photography or image rights, logo rights, third party data rights, etc. for content and materials that may be included in Your Application).” Apple has informed you of numerous third party intellectual property complaints concerning over 100 of your Applications and reminded you of your obligations to obtain the necessary rights prior to submission of your Applications. Nevertheless, we continue to receive the same or similar types of complaints regarding your Applications despite our repeated notices to you. The persistent nature of such complaints has led us to conclude that you are entering into the representations and warranties in the iDP Agreement in bad faith by misrepresenting that you have all the necessary rights for your submissions.
As required by Section 12.3 of the iDP Agreement and Section 8 of the Registered Developer Agreement, please erase and destroy all copies, full or partial, of the Apple Software and any information pertaining to the services and all copies of Apple Confidential Information in your and your Authorized Developers’ possession or control. After you have completed those steps, please provide certification of that destruction to Apple, as provided in Section 12.3 and Section 8. Finally, please note your additional obligations on termination as set forth in those same sections. This letter is not intended as a complete statement of fact with respect to the subject matter hereof, and nothing in this letter should be construed as a waiver of any rights or remedies Apple may have in connection with this matter, all of which are expressly reserved.
Sincerely,
Worldwide Developer Relations (WWDR)
Apple Inc.
