The folks over at iFixit are quite well-known in the tech community for tearing down devices new to the market to explore their internal components. To date, they have stripped down various gadgets including the Microsoft Surface Pro 2, PlayStation 4, Apple's iPhones and the iPad Mini 4, among others. But the team is in some hot water right now for prematurely disassembling the new Apple TV, as this violated the company's terms and conditions with Apple.
Apparently, iFixit was sent a developer unit of the Apple TV and Siri Remote and while the team had agreed to certain terms and conditions which forbade them to tear down the devices and publish a video about it before permission from Apple, they "weighed the risks, blithely tossed those risks over our shoulder, and tore down the Apple TV anyway". A few days later, they were sent an email from Apple, which claimed that:
[iFixit had taken] actions that may hinder the performance or intended use of the App Store, B2B Program, or the Program.
As a part of their punishment, iFixit's developer account has been banned which consequently also means that their application for the OS is no longer available in the store. However, the folks at iFixit are unabashed by their predicament and state that:
The good news is we’ve been working like gangbusters on our mobile site. All the functionality you need for mobile is already there. Obviously, we’d love it if our app was in the store. But our small team has limited resources, and for the past months we’ve chosen to improve our mobile website—to benefit all mobile users—instead of making improvements to our app. The app that Apple pulled was outdated, and iOS 9 introduced some major bugs into the system. Fixing them would require a substantial rewrite to a bunch of iOS 4-era code.
iFixit further explains that as a result, it isn't working working on making a new iOS app, but given that its old application is open-source, it has invited developers to build on it while respecting the company's license. Needless to say, iFixit will continue supporting its Android app and mobile website.
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