Is Apple Able To Disable Apps Remotely?

With everybody sensitive about big brother watching, what with companies recently putting useless monitoring programs out such as the Windows WGA, iPhone users probably won’t be too happy to hear what Jonathan Zdziarski, author of iPhone Forensics has to say. He discovered a remote URL that Apple is using to keep a list of offending applications. The URL is https://iphone-services.apple.com/clbl/unauthorizedApps and he explains:

“This suggests that the iPhone calls home once in a while to find out what applications it should turn off. At the moment, no apps have been blacklisted, but by all appearances, this has been added to disable applications that the user has already downloaded and paid for, if Apple so chooses to shut them down.

“I discovered this doing a forensic examination of an iPhone 3G. It appears to be tucked away in a configuration file deep inside CoreLocation.”

If this works the way it sounds, Apple could possibly deauthorize applications that have already been installed on a user’s iPhone. While Apple probably won’t be using this without thinking, it’s still worrying to see that Apple seems to have gone down this path.