Despite that Apple’s walled garden for both MacOS and iOS are of the “most secure” ecosystems out there, Apple wasn’t doing its job properly as Kimi was blatantly violating its Terms of Service by promoting pirated movies and TV shows. Prominent tech outfits like The Verge and Wired discovered the true intent of Kimi, which masqueraded as a “vision-testing” app, and it took Apple months before they removed Kimi from the App Store. We don’t know what took Apple this long to spot an app that was promoting piracy, but this gives us an idea that there are times that they were not enforcing their rules strictly.
What’s so ironic about Kimi is that 1) it was in the App Store since September 2023 as The Verge pointed out, and 2) it was at the list of trending apps, peaking at number 8 and ranking above Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, and 3) Apple took MONTHS before realizing that Kimi was blatantly promoting pirated movies out in the open–which occurred after The Verge published a long piece about Kimi.
What made Kimi insane (especially for the lucky few who managed to download it) is that there was no other tricks to watch movies and TV shows: you simply browse through the app, and everything is there. To add insult to injury, this is not the first time that an app promoting piracy made it through Apple’s “secure” walled garden: back in 2015, there was this multiplatform app called Popcorn Time, which made use of torrent networks for users to watch the latest shows.
