Calendar 2, a Monero mining app which used the user’s device to mine the digital currency in the background was recently removed from the Mac App Store. Apple states the reason behind their decision was because of high resource consumption by the app which strained the user’s system.
Calendar 2 came with a unique freemium plan. It offered users access to loads of features through a full app purchase. However, the same elements could be enjoyed if the user agrees to donate some of their CPU resources for cryptocurrency mining.
Now, Apple users have been facing problems related to the app for quite some time now. Once a user signed up with the Monero mining option, it didn’t allow them to opt-out from the option. However, Apple approached the developers with the main concern that their app was taking up more CPU power than what it claimed. The company even sent a warning notice to the developers:
“…design your app to use power effectively. Apps should not rapidly drain battery, generate heat, or put unnecessary strain on device resources.”
Since the developers weren’t forced to take down the app because of cryptocurrency related issues, they were considering the option to iron out the technical optimization issues as pointed out by Apple. However, they concluded that refining the app will take a long time and it was better to pull out the app. This is what they wrote as an official statement before taking Calender 2 out off the Mac App Store:
“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[…]I believe in the future of cryptocurrency, just not Proof of Work. So we started a spin-off company, Intercoin Inc. to make a global currency and payment network that doesn’t rely on Proof of Work, Proof of Stake and can handle an unlimited number of transactions at the same time.”