The piracy app Kimi, which let users watch stolen movies and TV shows on their iPhones, briefly surpassed streaming heavyweights on Apple’s App Store rankings before being removed by the company for violating its rules.
According to data from app intelligence firm Appfigures, the piracy app, Kimi, managed to snag 4th place on the App Store’s free entertainment apps list on Monday and ranked 12th on top apps overall. This put it ahead of HBO Max, Hulu, Netflix, Peacock, and Disney+ in both categories. Kimi’s glory was short-lived, however. By Tuesday, HBO Max had gotten ahead of it in the entertainment ranking. Apple yanked Kimi from the App Store the same day.
The app, Kimi, without a doubt, had it coming. Besides broadcasting pirated content, Kimi developers masqueraded the app as a vision-testing platform to get past Apple’s strict review filters, describing it as “an interesting APP that tests your eyesight.” They also made it sound like a game, stating that the app would present users with two pictures and ask them to spot the differences.
But Kimi was nothing like what its developers described. When users opened the app, which had a sleek interface similar to Netflix or Crunchyroll, they were greeted with a slew of popular movies and TV shows to watch—though not always in the best quality. The Oscar-nominated Poor Things, for instance, was grainy and pixelated.
In its quasi-review, The Verge stated that Kimi was actually not that bad app-wise, noting that its search functionality was equipped with easy-to-use filters. It even had in-app rankings of the most-watched content.
Although Kimi was released on the App Store last September, it remained relatively unknown until early February. Appfigures told Gizmodo that Kimi downloads spiked this past weekend, with the app accumulating about 65,000 downloads on Sunday and Monday.
Apple removed Kimi from the App Store on Tuesday. The company told Gizmodo that the developers’ misrepresentation of Kimi was a clear violation of the App Store Review Guidelines and that Apple had taken it down as soon as it found out.
The fact that Kimi made it onto the App Store and stayed there for so long is a bad look for Apple, which has long touted the security of its App Store and the team of 500 experts it has reviewing more than 100,000 apps per week. But if an app like Kimi, which didn’t even try that hard to hide its true intentions, could get in, it’s yet another reminder to take Apple’s statements with a grain of salt.