Bluetooth OnOff, an incredibly useful app which does one thing — toggle your iPhone’s Bluetooth connection on and off — has inevitably been pulled from the App Store. The 99-cent Universal app used private APIs to work its magic, and is now sadly consigned to the trashcan, along with data-tethering apps and other much-missed utilities.
IOS has many APIs (application programming interface) which developers use to make their apps work with iPhone and iPad hardware and software. Some are public and supported, and some are off limits. Some private APIs are later made public, but private APIs are strictly off-limits for anyone but Apple. Sometimes this is just because they aren’t yet fully-baked, and Apple wants to be able to ditch them or change them substantially without breaking everybody’s apps.
And low-level access to the Bluetooth radio is one of these. Frankly, its a little odd that OnOff stayed around for so long, considering that its purpose was made pretty obvious by both the icon and the one-button interface. There is a crappy peer-to-peer messaging feature in there, too, but who would ever use that?
Thankfully, I have the app squirreled safely away in my iTunes library, and if you read our original post about the app, you will already have it, too. The rest of you can continue to enjoy multiple button-presses and menu navigation just to switch Bluetooth on and off.
[Via TUAW]
