Watching pirated movies on your iPhone just got a little harder. After climbing the charts of Apple’s App Store, the trendy Kimi app, with its collection of bootlegged movies, has just disappeared. Pretending to be a spot-the-difference vision-testing game, the widely downloaded app ranked above Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video in Apple’s charts this week for free entertainment apps before it was removed.
was unable to reach Evans or anyone involved with the Kimi app prior to publication. Apple is known for being meticulous and protective of its “walled garden” for safe-to-download apps, so it’s surprising to see a piracy streaming option, like Kimi, climb so high on the charts before being axed. Kimi received more than 100 user reviews in the App Store, many of which blatantly mentioned the free movies hidden within the app, and it had a four-star user rating.
spoke with the developers behind Popcorn Time, a similar app. Security reporter Andy Greenberg wrote, “With Popcorn Time, the complexity of BitTorrent search engines, trackers, clients, seeds, decompression, playback, and storage is reduced to a single click.” It’s unconfirmed how Kimi was providing the streams, but the process of watching bootlegs was definitely simplified for users—just download the smartphone app and press Play.