VLC removed from App Store, now available on Cydia

By Matthew Chung on 01/09/2011, filed in Home > Apple

VLC removed from App Store, now available on Cydia Many iPad and iPhone owners out there were probably overjoyed when the multi-format video player VLC arrived on the iOS platform. Issues immediately appeared over the program’s licensing and there was probably only one likely outcome to the whole issue – the app has since been removed from Apple’s App Store. According to the complaint, the DRM in the App Store violated the GNU General Public License on the program and the folks behind the VLC project contacted Apple to remove the app.

The app has since been made available on Cydia, so if you’re running a jailbroken iOS device, there’s still hope yet. This does raise the issue if VLC and other similar GNU GPL-licensed apps will be available on Apple’s latest Mac App Store, though, since it should use similar DRM features too.

Apple Inc: Apple Inc was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne as a computer company wich is often credited to have initiated personal computing. After a meteoric rise in the 80s, Apple had lost the personal computing battle against Microsoft and others in the 90s. But in the late 90s and early 2000s, the company came back to profitability by focusing on less products and started using industry-standard components. Apple's largest business is now in the smartphone space, with the iPhone representing more than half of the revenues and an even larger part of the profits. Read our Apple product reviews to see what the company has been up to: iPhone 5 Review, Macbook Pro with Retina display review

iOS: was once upon a time called iPhone OS, or "operating system", which is the software that provides all the basic device functionality and is the interface between the hardware and applications. iOS was introduced with the iPhone on January 9 2007, and it was originally not intended to be programmable by third parties. Steve Jobs had envisioned that developers could create Web Apps that would run in the browser. This changed less than one year after when the iPhone SDK (software development kit) was introduced in October 2007. Today, hundreds of thousands of apps have been created for this platform. iPhone OS became iOS on June 2010. Interestingly, both iPhone and iOS were former trademarks of Cisco, that Apple now uses under a license.

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