iPhone tethering app: surprised it made it into the App Store for even an hour
Tethering your laptop and mobile phone together so that you can use the Internet over a 3G connection when you're too cheap to buy a dedicated data card is nothing new, but for iPhone 3G users it's a near impossibility.
Unless you want to jailbreak your iPhone and use a hacker-friendly application, there's been no way to pair the iPhone and laptop, until late last week an application called Netshare made it into the App Store -- yes, Apple's official iPhone App Store.
Then it disappeared. And reappeared. And... disappeared again. It's currently unavailable.
No-one has made an official statement as to why the application has been practising its teleportation skills. Perhaps it spends most of its life as an application for jailbroken iPhones, and ten percent of it as an official app?
The mobile operators shouldn't like this application, because while it allegedly doesn't break any of Apple's application guidelines (not porn, not an iTunes competitor...), it could certainly break a network's customer terms and conditions. No tethering.
Then again, some of the other authorised applications in the Apple store could potentially be breaking your terms of service f you use them -- notably streaming applications like Internet radio players. It's certainly against O2's policies.
The Netshare application isn't a plug-and-play solution, in any case, and requires tweaking of some the iPhone's more intimate settings. It's also likely to drain the battery faster than Bod can drink a milkshake, so it's not likely to have sucked up much bandwidth before the iPhone dies.
Maybe the application just isn't user friendly enough for Apple's liking, but then it was approved in the first place.
Hopefully we'll hear something about Apple's reasoning for yo-yo-ing the application, even if it never makes it back into the App Store.
(Via The Register)
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