A Blatant Piracy App Snuck onto the App Store Weakly Disguised as a Vision Test

There’s little doubt that Apple’s App Store Review team works very hard to process what must be an overwhelming number of apps. Still, every so often, we see something pop up that makes us wonder if somebody has been asleep at the wheel.

This week’s exhibit is an app dubbed Kimi. Ostensibly a vision testing app, it instead barely concealed access to a treasure trove of pirated video content. While that may be okay in Europe’s new app marketplaces, it’s something that’s explicitly prohibited by Apple’s App Review Guidelines.

However, what makes Kimi particularly interesting is that its developer wasn’t doing much to hide the app’s true purpose. While Kimi was quickly pulled from the App Store once it was outed by The Verge, its App Store page can still be found on the Wayback Machine, where you’ll see it described as “an interesting APP that tests your eyesight” that you can use to “compare and click on the two pictures to easily improve your observation skills!”

The Verge is being polite in calling this description half-assed, as it reads like gratuitous nonsense, with phrases like “different gameplay” and “beautiful scenery” strung together seemingly randomly.

However, a trip down to the reviews would quickly reveal the app’s true purpose, with comments like, “I downloaded this app to watch frozen II, Steven Universe, etc, but this app is actually pretty good for a free app to watch movies and tv shows on” and one even adding “a part of me feels like this is wrong because this feels like pirating but I’m not complaining.”

However, one would imagine the App Store Review team does more than just read the descriptions the developer submits. We’d expect that they should actually open the app at least once to see what it does… yet the developer, who is listed as “Marcus Evans,” wasn’t even trying to hide what the app was all about.

Opening Kimi didn’t reveal an app pretending to be a vision testing app, nor even showing anything that looked remotely like the screenshots on its App Store page. Instead, you’re taken straight to a screen of movies and TV shows, just like you might find in the Netflix app.

That’s it. You open it, and there are just movies and TV shows right there for you to watch. There’s no splash screen and no trick to unlock the real app. It wasn’t hidden at all under a thin veneer of legitimacy.

Wes Davis, The Verge

In other words, any Apple employee who bothered to open this app would have known within seconds it had little to do with “vision testing” — or anything else listed in its app description. Other than the movies and TV shows that could be streamed through the app, nothing here would qualify as an eyesight test or “scenery,” and there were no games in sight.

Even leaving Apple’s prohibition on apps that cross the piracy line, Kimi should have been rejected simply under the “false information and features” and “promoting content or services that it does not actually offer” since it doesn’t actually do a single thing it says it does.

Kimi appears to have not only made it past Apple’s crack review team but it’s also survived on the App Store for several months — and who knows how much longer it may have stuck around had it not made headlines and thereby come to Apple’s attention, especially after The Verge pointedly asked Apple exactly how this made it past the app review team.

Of course, Apple rejects literally millions of apps every year. In 2022, the company rejected 1.68 million apps out of 6.1 million submissions. That works out to about 16,700 submissions and 4,600 rejections per day. With numbers like that, it’s understandable that the App Store review team isn’t going to be able to catch everything. Still, it’s astounding something so blatantly obvious somehow managed to evade scrutiny.