You can find all binaries, including the one for iOS and Android, on our website, signed by the core developers. If you trust us, it is totally up to you. GitHub is used as a mirror only as we run our own infrastructure so quite obviously we are not using the GitHub release process.

As a developer of the VLC-iOS app, I can confirm that the binary itself is completely unchanged. It is indeed the signature that was updated.

No, this is a 3.0.0 feature.

Enter your details here: http://cl.ly/2p2B3S2y2w3Y

This is untrue. Apple is just publishing it in different regions at different times. I had a call with them 3 hours ago and they told me that it can take up to 12 hours (!) until all regions have it.

According to our WWDR contact, there is no way to blacklist trademarks you own on the App Store, so we need to send DMCA take-down notices for all infringements. We sent 39 against 48 apps last year and it takes apple up to 3 months to pull the apps, even for obvious violations.

It is not like we voluntary did either the removal nor being silent about it.

This is because you downloaded our app a while ago and we did something so you can re-download it to your device now. This is in preparation of our actual release in the next days (we won't release 2.4.0 publicly but 2.4.1 because of a regression).

Will I need to delete 2.4.0 when the new version comes out, or will I be able to just update it as usual from the App store?

Just update as usual :)

This is the last in a long row of copyright violations permitted by Apple to the store despite app review and multiple complaints by us in the past. This binary is based on buggy, old pre-production code, includes ads and absolutely non-working integrations to Dropbox, etc. because the provider did not set the private keys correctly. The official app currently awaits review and will hopefully be out soon. It will be stable, ad-free and with full support for the clouds.

Here is translated author's statement:

VLC is Open Source and I was irritated by how long they waits with their release - I've spent some nights on this and convinced Apple to approve it. And I succedeed. At first they returned it to me, because of violaton of copyright laws. I was expecting it, so I sent them links to MIT and GPL2 from VideoLAN webpage, where is stated, that you can use source code for whatever you want. Well, they approved it today.

Ok, at first, the app provider added advertisement to the app using Google AdSense to make a personal profit. Further, the license is not MIT but MPLv2 and GPLv2 which is intrinsically different - and we clearly don't say that you can use our code for whatever you want. Then, they don't provide the source code to their changes, which is required by either license. Those licenses are not being shown in the App Store. Finally, the App Store shows "© 2015 Voldzi" which means that you claim copyright for entire app, which they clearly don't have.

Believe it or not, I'm not an author of it... And I'm not approving it, just found it interesting, that Apple accepted it into App Store.

Using the code is fine, but the name is trademarked and should be enough to block it from the app store.

This is one of the reasons why you have to use a wrapper for the VLC binary to execute it within a root environment. Said wrapper is usually in an extra package on Linux and not provided on Windows and OS X (it can be compiled manually of course). Like 10 people per year complain about not being able to run VLC as root, but then again, why should you?