All of Qihoo’s apps have been pulled from the App Store back on the 26th of January, and they weren’t told of the reason. QQ Tech’s article on the subject says the removals were down to a violation of terms of service but no specifics were given. It also claims that the apps aren’t going to be returned unless something changes. This has alarmed the chief financial officer of Qihoo so much that he is going over to the U.S. to talk it out with Apple and hopefully get back on the App Store.
However QQ Tech, the website reporting all this is actually owned by Tencent who are one of Qihoo’s competitors so it might not be entirely genuine.
Qihoo has got a reputation for using questionable business practices though, so it might be real – they’ve been warned by the Chinese State Administration for Industry and Commerce for unfair competition as they use their anti-virus software in their browsers.
It’s also the second time these apps have been removed from the app store by Apple, last time was almost a year ago and Qihoo claimed it was due to unusually high numbers of positive and negative feedback, which triggered an automatic deletion.
