Aurora Feint Removed From App Store

Aurora Feint, the role-playing iPhone game, was delisted from the App Store for security reasons late last night. Apparently nothing malicious, as the Aurora Feint team has been extremely candid in posting what they have and have not done on their message boards, but Apple has felt it prudent to suspend the app's distribution until further notice. According to the post, Aurora Feint skim through your iPhone contact list and send the information, unencrypted, to their servers in an effort to match you with currently playing friends. In trying to explain how this 'community feature' was developed and put into practice, Danielle & Jason write:

Why automatically? Well, everyone always complains about the keyboard on the iPhone and how annoying it is to type on it. So we thought, "Hey, why don't we make this feature REALLY easy to use – no typing!" And such, the community feature was born. Some people have said that it would have been ok if we had a better notice explaining what was going on. I agree! We weren't trying to be sneaky about how this worked. It was just overlooked. No one we showed it to even asked a question about it – nor did we. It just simply never came up as a potential issue when we beta tested the game with early users.

They go on to say that an update of Aurora Feint has already been sent to Apple (though its currently "In Review") and includes a fix that encrypts the contact data. Additionally, the've sent in another update where the 'community feature' is completely removed. Danielle and Jason appear to be doing everything in their power to make things right, if only Apple would help communicate the steps to do so:

We are trying to get in touch with Apple to work with them on how to move forward so that everyone can continue to enjoy our game and feel comfortable about applications on their phone. If you work at Apple or know anyone who does, please contact me and Jason directly via PM on this forum.

Seems like the iPhone community is giving some great and constructive feedback to the Aurora Feint crew, which you can check out and contribute to HERE.

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