Almost a week after Apple removed The OG App from the App Store, an Instagram client that promised to provide an ad-free and suggestion-free feed, Google followed suit and booted the app off the Play Store.
The OG App was an app created by Un1feed, a company of which co-founders said that the company won’t be able to serve its users following the removal of App from both iOS and Android’s app stores. It had more than 25,000 users by the time it became unavailable.
Late last month, a company called Un1feed launched The OG App with a promise to provide users with a personalizable Instagram experience. To do so, it reverse-engineered the iOS and Android apps for Instagram. However, that created a lot of issues that could compromise user privacy and security.
Last week, Instagram announced that it was deleting a number of Instagram accounts, mostly from the Asia Pacific region. These accounts violated our policies, and the company is taking appropriate enforcement action. Unfortunately, they didn’t give any details about what these actions were.
Around the same time, Apple removed the app from the App Store saying that it was accessing Instagram’s service in an unauthorized manner. However, it added that The OG App violated the rules of the app store and that users are not allowed to violate these terms.
The founders of The OG App wrote a note on their website earlier today, saying they are still thinking about the next steps that they’ll be taking.
In response to some security mishaps, Meta has now enforced stricter rules around access to user data and limited the amount of information it provides outside of its family of apps. For example, the company quickly cracked down on a third-party app that was using unofficial APIs to display content.