14 DAY TRIAL // An application called Calendar 2 and approved by Apple to be listed for download in the Mac App Store was offering users the possibility of getting access to premium features by allowing coin mining to be performed on their computers.
While such applications aren’t allowed in the App Store in the first place, a bug caused Calendar 2 to continue running the cryptocurrency mining in the background even if users opted out of the feature and without them knowing about it.
Parent developer Qbix said in a statement that the calendar app was hit by several bugs that eventually “made it seem like our company wanted to mine crypto-currency without people’s permission,” confirming that this functionality has been removed in the next updates. Users will still be allowed to get access to premium features by paying for them though the App Store.
Mining for Moneo, a cryptocurrency that offers more anonymous means of making transactions online, obviously produced a series of side-effects on systems, including high CPU usage, despite the digital coin actually offering a hashing algorithm that’s not as heavy on hardware resources as Bitcoin, for instance.
High CPU usage
Some users said the mining “ate 200% CPU” running in the background, and Qbix founder Gregory Magarshak says this was mostly caused by problems with the code offered by the company which provided the miner library and who “did not disclose the source code.”
“It would take too long for them to fix the root cause of the CPU issue,” he continued, explaining that pulling this functionality should be “some sort of precedent for other apps as well.”
“Ultimately, even though we technically could have remedied the situation and continued on benefiting from the pretty large income such a miner generates, we took the above as a sign that we should get out of the "mining business" before we get sucked into the Proof of Work morass of incentives,” he says.
Calendar 2 has already been removed from the Mac App Store, but at this point, it’s not clear who pulled the app. Apple might have very well removed the listing because it violated its guidelines, but at the same time, with Qbix working on an update to remove the mining, the company might have very well temporarily unpublished the app itself.