Meanwhile Qustodio, in a statement showed to Threatpost regarding the EU complaint, said that Apple has arbitrarily blocked several parental-control apps in the market from making app updates, while completely removing others. “Standing up to Apple is about even more than fair competition.” “To create Screen Time, Apple took the best pieces and best practices from existing parental-control and well-being apps in the App Store, bringing no tangible innovations to market,” Kidslox CEO Viktor Yevpak said in a statement provided to Threatpost. Kidslox alleges that Apple has required it to make changes to its app that ultimately harmed it competitive factor. The complaint from Kidslox and Qustodio that was filed with the European Commission’s competition office was filed in tandem with the report, saying that the removal and restriction of parental-control apps was an anti-competitive practice by nature. The move comes after Apple launched its own screen control app, Screen Time, a feature built into iOS 12 that enables users to set screen time and limits on their own phones. That includes forcing apps to remove features that enable parents to control children’s devices, or restrict access to adult content. The Saturday report by the New York Times, working with app data firm Sensor Tower, shows that Apple has removed or restricted 11 of the 17 most downloaded parental-control apps, as well as restricting lesser-known apps. Impacted app developers, for their part, continue to be up-in-arms regarding the incident – with two popular parental control apps, Kidslox and Qustodio, last week filing an anti-competition complaint with the European Commission’s competition office. Regardless of the reason, the incident has raised questions about how competition is handled between apps and the sometimes-competing platforms that they are sold on. It’s important to understand why and how this happened,” the company said in a Sunday statement, entitled “The Facts About Parental Control Apps.” “We recently removed several parental-control apps from the App Store, and we did it for a simple reason: They put users’ privacy and security at risk. Parental-control apps, which allow parents to keep tabs (and set limits) on their children’s on-phone activities, locations and more, are thus effectively collecting way too much data, Apple said. While it looks like a competitive move, Apple tells a different story: Its aim was to weed out apps that were using mobile device management (MDM) technology it said, which gives third-party control and access over other devices and sensitive information, including location, app use and more.

Among those that have been removed are OurPact, which has 3 million downloads, and Mobicip, which has 2.5 million downloads. Apple is defending its decision to take down several highly popular parental control apps amidst a firestorm of backlash, saying it did so for “privacy and security” reasons.Īpple came under scrutiny this weekend after a New York Times article alleged that the phone giant had unfairly removed or restricted at least 11 top screen-time and parental-control apps from its marketplace – after creating its own screen-time app.

Remove qustodio ios app