(Image courtesy of MobileCrunch)

From today’s “should have seen this one coming” department, Apple has pulled the popular TapTapTap Camera+ app from the App Store after the company let it slip that a rejected feature could easily be enabled through a trick in Mobile Safari. Needless to say, Apple was not amused.

MobileCrunch is reporting that the popular Camera+ app is no longer available on the App Store -- presumably until developer TapTapTap fixes the “Easter egg” that enabled users to use the iPhone’s volume buttons as a camera shutter button. Apple had previously rejected the app once before for the very same functionality, which they claim would confuse users.

Camera+ is (was?) a nifty replacement for Apple’s own Camera app which adds a host of pro features beyond Cupertino’s own offering. Using the iPhone volume buttons to enable taking a picture with Camera+ was one they were quite excited about, so after Apple denied them from doing it, they slipped it in anyway -- all the user had to do was type camplus://enablevolumesnap into Mobile Safari and the feature would then be enabled within Camera+, as revealed via a Twitter message that was mysteriously pulled about 30 minutes after it went out.

Word quickly spread through the Internet (including a post here on MacLife.com yesterday) about the hidden feature, so it’s no surprise that right around the witching hour (that would be midnight), Camera+ was no longer available from the App Store.

As MobileCrunch notes, TapTapTap is “a fairly prominent development team” with a number of well-regarded apps in the App Store. It’s hard to imagine that Apple would slap them on the wrist too hard, but given the increasing number of recent high-profile hacks that have slipped into the App Store -- most notoriously, the tethering app that was cleverly disguised as a flashlight -- the powers that be might want to make an example of someone.

If you already own Camera+, the existing app will continue to have the hidden functionality, at least for now. We’d say it’s almost a certainty that when Camera+ returns to the App Store, that little hidden feature will be gone, gone, gone…

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