Avoid iDontCrash and developer Brandon (El Jabon).
A week ago, a developer tried to send me an app called iDontCrash to host. Being curious, and a developer myself, I asked a few questions about this app before hosting it. The answers proved to me that it is total fraud on the community. It should be called iDontWork or iAmFake. This app gave me hours of enjoyment while we were picking it apart. In short, do not trust this app or its developer Brandon Rose. It is upsetting when someone tries to harm our community, therefore, I decided to post all about this app and its pseudo developer.

What is iDontCrash? It is nothing. A fake app not even built for iPhone that does nothing but give you, the hopeful user, false hopes.

What does iDontCrash claim to be? It claims to be an app that prevents crashing due to low memory. Sounds great right? It sounded pretty dubious. So we looked into it. What did we find?

1) iDontCrash is not even an iPhone application. It’s not compiled for ARM6 processor.

2) iDontCrash was generated using the wizard in xcode. Then the binary was compiled for the iPhone simulator that runs on the MAC. Of course this cannot run on an iPhone.

3) iDontCrash claims to run and close instantly then putting a daemon onto the system that monitors memory usage. This does not happen. Instead, the app crashes because it is an invalid binary for the system. Here is a copy of the log:

(UIKitApplication:com.yourcompany.iDon_t_Crash[0×4c3f][63]): posix_spawnp(”/var/stash/.FZm9EA/iDon’t Crash.app/iDon’t Crash”, …): Bad CPU type in executable

Oct 9 03:44:35 Dev-Phone SpringBoard[25]: Unable to obtain task name port for com.yourcompany.iDon_t_Crash. Either it failed to exec or it terminated immediately: (os/kern) failure

Oct 9 03:44:35 Dev-Phone com.apple.launchd[1] (UIKitApplication:com.yourcompany.iDon_t_Crash[0×4c3f][63]): Exited with exit code: 1

As you can see, the app does nothing and is not even made for an iPhone. It relies on the deception that the app is supposed to close as soon as you run it (think insomnia) and tricks the user into thinking it actually is doing something. So, the app is made for the simulator, right? We ran it on the simulator and guess what it does?

It is the unmodified Navigation Controller template from xcode!

So, what is up with developer Brandon Rose? Why release such an app? Great question. At this version, the app seems to be harmless, do nothing. But it could become malicious in the future. This guy should be blacklisted and not trusted. Could this be an honest mistake? Not a chance. This is a foiled attempt at blatant fraud.

Brandon has built a website (I had to remove the link because it randomly goes to porn sites) around his fake app and recorded a video of himself demonstrating the app. I cannot explain why so much effort was put into something fake. (By the way, the video is funny. The guy looks stoned and keeps rubbing his face).

As an additional point of interest, the description of the app has also changed after our first email exchanges. The first version it was explained that it moved files around on disk from the /Applications folder to the “other” partition to free up low memory space. I explained to Brandon that flash memory is hard disk space not “RAM” and that moving files around on hard disk would not solve low memory conditions that cause apps to crash. After this, the description of his app changed and references to his video were dropped. Very interesting.

I have email logs of everything, I may post them depending on what happens to this app. Brandon also was kind enough to give me his telephone number, which I do not have the heart to post here (at this time).

Feel free to contact Brandon for comments (sorry, I removed the email link after Brandon pleaded several times for me to do so).

Update (October 9th): The beta tester was unaware of all this. After having it explained to him has asked to be removed and not associated with Brandon’s app. I am reasonable so have done so. Brandon has contacted me and said that my post is “untrue”. However, he still has not provided any details explaining why it is “untrue”. (I guess I’m supposed to just take his word for it after all the analysis above?) So I have given Brandon the task of providing:

1) A detailed explanation of what the app does. Showing code samples or whatever is required to convince a developer that understands these things.

2) A working app that I can see working.

I will happily recant all this if Brandon can come through. At this point, there is no indication that will ever happen.

Since this app is just an xcode template, I have posted how to create an identical match to iDontCrash v1.5 as it is packed up:

1) Open xcode
2) File, new project
3) Double click Navigation-Based application
4) Type a foldername “iDon’t Crash” and save.
5) Click “build”
6) Zip the built folder and enjoy your “do nothing” app.

Tags: brandon, fake app, fraud, idontcrash