WRAPPED for Instagram has been removed from the app store just two months after being released.
The new app that went viral earlier this week claimed it could let users see who viewed their Instagram profiles.
1
Now, it has vanished from the app store entirely after Meta said it asked Apple to remove it.
The third-party app was not associated with Instagram or its parent company Meta.
However, millions of people still downloaded it, leading the app to catapult to the top of the App Store’s charts.
WRAPPED FOR INSTAGRAM
The app was launched in September and claimed it could offer users details about their Instagram account.
This supposedly included how many accounts took screenshots of posts and how many accounts blocked them.
And of course, most sensationally, which accounts viewed users’ profiles.
Naturally, this raised privacy concerns for both Meta and Instagram users who were worried their data was being revealed.
A spokesperson for Meta told NBC News that the Wrapped app “violates our policies and we’ve asked Apple to remove it from the App Store.”
Most read in News Tech
The spokesperson did not specify which violation and declined to comment further.
As of Tuesday, November 7, the app’s website’s server IP address could no longer be found.
It’s not clear at the moment if that app did provide users with the services it claimed to.
When the software was still on the app store, many reviewers gave it one out of five stars.
And many users claimed the data appeared to be false because of several inconsistencies, per NBC.
‘Every time I tried using Instagram Wrapped, it gave me different results,” one user Karlo Markuš said.
“I tried the app with a few new accounts I made and a few accounts I don’t use anymore, and they all said false information.”
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Wrapped told NBC that its team has “great confidence” in the accuracy of its results.
They added that the developers cannot reveal details about how it works to prevent others from copying it.
