A kind of hyperaccelerated Greek tragedy was aired over the weekend involving Apple and the MetaMask crypto wallet.
Indeed, at some point on Saturday, news began to circulate, especially on X, that the MetaMask app was no longer available in the Apple Store.
The news was later confirmed on the wallet’s official profile.
The official announcement also said that the team was working to be able to allow the app to return to the iPhone store as soon as possible, and in fact less than an hour later they announced its restoration.
The removal affected only the Apple Store, and not Google Play.
Summary
What happened between Apple and the crypto wallet MetaMask
MetaMask is a crypto wallet developed by Consensys, but neither its official profile nor that of its parent company published full details of the incident.Â
However, since the problem was promptly fixed, it is safe to assume that it specifically concerned Apple Store policies.
It is possible that the removal was accompanied by some kind of notice to developers, in which the reason for the removal should have been included.
The developers promptly took action to try to figure out where the problem was, and how to correct it, and apparently in really record time they located and fixed it.
At that point they resubmitted the app to the Apple Store for review, and this time it passed the platform’s policy compliance test.
The motivation
Officially, the motivation that prompted Apple to remove the app from the Store has not been disclosed.
The only details released are that it was not a security issue, and that the removal was not even a consequence of a user-requested action. These statements suggest that the developers knew precisely what Apple Store policies were found to have been violated.
Nevertheless, they still decided not to disclose this information, which sounds at least a little strange.
Something like this had already happened in early 2020 on Google Play, and back then, in a completely different context and with a significantly older version of the app, it had been a misunderstanding. It took many days before the problem was fixed, whereas this time it took very few hours.Â
The assumption therefore is that this time the developers had to intervene to change something, whereas in 2020 it was enough to show that the app was not mining.
However, it seems that the changes were not made to the app, but only to the Apple account under which the app had been added to the Store.
MetaMask’s Lead Product Manager, Taylor Monahan, in fact stated that the problem found by Apple involved “something procedural (?) with the Apple account,” and not having to do with the app itself.
This is why they were able to solve it so quickly.
The risks to users
MetaMask users therefore should not have been at any kind of risk.
However, the app remained always active and usable normally and regularly, only for a couple of hours it was not possible to download and install it. For those who had already downloaded and installed it, absolutely nothing changed.
In these cases however, it is recommended not to keep all tokens on one wallet, precisely because sometimes some wallets can have problems. Keeping the funds separate in different wallets greatly reduces the risk of having them all in fact blocked.
What’s more, MetaMask’s code is open source, so anyone in theory can go and see how it works and what it does.
It is a non-custodial wallet, which allows the user to exclusively own the seed and private keys of the wallet itself, making it even more secure.
The fact that it was not removed from Google Play indicates quite clearly that the problem was not with the wallet, but only with Apple’s policies.
Apple’s policies for the MetaMask crypto wallet
Apple in fact has arguably more stringent policies than Google Play.
For example, it requires that a portion of the takings made from apps that are downloaded from the Apple Store be turned back to Apple, and this also affects MetaMask.
But the fees paid by wallet users to send tokens do not go to MetaMask or Consensys, but to the miners or validator nodes, so they cannot be shared with Apple, even in part.
This was probably not a fee issue, however, since it appears to be connected to MetaMask’s account on Apple and not to the app itself.
Apple also imposes restrictive policies on developer accounts that publish apps to their Store, and in this case it may have been some temporarily missing requirement that was sufficient to provide to reactivate the account.
