Google admits to violating iPhone terms of use

Google’s new voice-activated search app has been rasing a few eyebrows – and not just because it can’t understand a word us Brits are saying.

The app uses a combination of the iPhone’s motion sensor and the proximity sensor to tell when you have lifted the phone to your ear ready to speak your search terms.  The iPhone normally uses the proximity sensor to deactivate the screen whenever you hold the phone to your ear during a call.

This is a neat hack, but it has been puzzling developers who can’t understand how Google access the function using Apple’s published systems development kit (SDK) – the function isn’t exposed as being usable by programmers.

Today Google have ‘fessed up. The wrote their own SDK, thus violating the terms of use that Apple imposes on would-be iPhone developers. Bad Google!

Of course, this poses the interesting question of how th app got past Apple’s famously twitchy approvals process. Could it be that there is one rule for regular developers and quite another for big players like Google?

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