I'm sure app and website will soon be back.
As soon as Google is informed that this is not clumsy programming, but NSA data collection outsourced to a company in China.
Wopwopwop . . .
Google has yanked an app that purported to give Android users the ability to use iMessage. As is discussed by Jay Freeman here, there was a catch in the app. It didn't “make iMessage run on Android”, but rather sent data off for pre-processing to a server in China. And that meant users were being asked to submit their Apple …
unfortunately most of china uses something called WeChat, fine a nice chat app you think... but the permissions are pervasive, so if you want to keep in touch with friends living behind the great wall, you have to install this monstrosity of an app that basically has full permissions to do anything it bloody well likes!
Chinas government does not need to hack, all its citizens are freely letting the gov read their messaging...
If you think Facebook is bad (and it is, the latest permissions for that app are horrendous too) then wechat is worse..
@AC 10:25
Ridiculous permissions issues are possibly the biggest flaw in the Android OS from a user's perspective, and one that I think Google has finally realised it needs to fix (by the sound of what's forthcoming in Kitkat). (The combination of lack of user education and thieving bastards developing apps means you get stupid nonsense like torch apps which demand access to your address book, permission to send SMS messages and all sorts of other crap - and, even worse, idiot users trying do defend this....)
Cyanogenmod was, for a while, the fix for this - up until CM7 ie Gingerbread, it had the ability to let you over-rule per-app permissions as you wished. For some stupid bloody reason they decided not to implement this in ICS, then later changed their mind when the community made enough of a fuss, then realised they'd left it long enough they may as well just wait for the source for 4.3 to be made available and have it become a core Android feature.
I discovered this, of course, after going through the process of putting CM9 on my Xperia Mini Pro. This weekend will involve downgrading to CM7, which should also rather helpfully improve performance...
So they removed it from the Play Store, but left it on my device, therefore there's no way to remove it without going into Settings > Applications
if I wasn't a geek, how would I know to do this? I would have hoped it would still show as a placeholder in My Installed Apps list in the Play Store, and allow me to uninstall it only.