Presented as a note-taking application, Univer Note is in reality an application allowing you to watch many films and series illegally.
An application that hides another. On the Apple App Store, an application found itself at the top of the ranking in France, ahead of the Google application, this Monday, November 4. Called Univer Note, it aims, according to its description, to help users “record the events of the day and plan your time”. Problem: it is actually completely illegal.
A popular fake app
While many users – especially in the comments – suggest that Univer Note is a note-taking application, the reality is quite different. As Tech&Co noted, the application allows access to a catalog of films and series in streaming, completely illegally. This November 4 at midday, it was still accessible and placed in first place in the ranking of the most popular applications in France.
Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video… the application is full of content from SVOD platforms, including Apple's, drowned in advertisements. Its popularity is notably linked to its wide promotion on social networks. On Twitter, she is mentioned in tweets seen hundreds of thousands of times by a user whose account is now suspended.
It's rare for Apple to leak illegal apps, but it already happened in October. As noted by the specialized site Numerama, an application called Micro Habits and posing as a personal life manager already allowed illegal access to films and series. While Apple removed it, the app returned under a new name (Flower Butler), which is also no longer available.
Univer Note therefore seems to be a new iteration of this same illegal streaming application, using the codes of the two previous ones, but which this time has managed to reach the top of the App Store rankings.
In a press release dated March 2024, Apple recalled having among its teams 500 experts evaluating “each application submitted by developers around the world before it reaches users”. On average, each Apple specialist evaluates 265 applications per week.
According to Tech&Co's findings, the Univer Note application was offered a month ago in version 1.0, before switching to version 2.0 three weeks ago. An update which could have made it possible to slip through the cracks, by modifying a seemingly innocuous application – validated by Apple – into a pirate application.
Contacted by Tech&Co, Apple has not yet responded.
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