Box Office Pulled From App Store, Developer Left Dazed and Confused

Box Office, one of my personal favorite apps, has been removed from the App Store. For those of you unfamiliar with Box Office, it is was a movie ticket/info application which allowed you to browse by movie, theatre, and current location. It listed all movie times and provided brief Rotten Tomato reviews, along with direct links to pre-order tickets for the movie. In other words, it was a sweet app – and it worked very well.

But unfortunately, unless you’ve already downloaded Box Office, you can’t get it any more. This news comes as a shock not only to iPhone users, but to the developer himself, who had absolutely no idea why his free application had been removed.

He released the following statement:

Apple pulled the app yesterday without giving me any notification that they were doing it, or what their justification was for removing it.

I’ve tried to contact them about the issue, but it’s been a complete dead end. If anyone has a useful contact number for Apple, please let me know.

I’m in regular contact with all my data providers, and none of them have had an issue with my app. Indeed, the response was the exact opposite. They like my app and have even asked if i would do custom application work for them in the future. Furthermore, all the data I use is licensed by the owners as ‘free for non commercial use’. i.e. precisely what Box Office is.

So I’m stuck here not knowing what has happened, or what i can do about it.

Although the developer explicitly says that he has 100% rights to all the data he uses, it seems a bit odd that the only two App Store apps which use data from RottenTomatoes – Box Office and Tomatoes – have been pulled from the App Store.

The latter of the two, Tomatoes, is a native app version of the entire RottenTomatoes.com site – and it was created by a 3rd party developer with no affiliation to them. Not only is the app no longer available for download, it simply doesn’t work even if you’ve downloaded it in the past.

Fortunately, that’s not the case with Box Office. If you already got it, it’s yours.