Calendar 2 made $2K in three days by mining cryptocurrency; app was pulled for violating Mac App Store guidelines and is back after mining features were removed
Yesterday, we reported on a macOS app called Calendar 2 that seemingly added cryptocurrency mining as an alternative to paying for premium features.
Context & Ripple Effects
Calendar 2's developer had already walked back most of the experiment the day before: after the update shipped with Monero mining on by default, poor reviews forced the app off the store, with the dev promising a clean version in the next release. What changed today is that Apple made the reversal official policy in practice — the app only came back once the mining code was gone.
The episode lands in the middle of a documented cryptojacking boom: Symantec counted an 8,500% quarterly jump in cryptojacking instances in late 2017, driven partly by turnkey mining kits. Calendar 2 is the first high-profile test of whether that model can survive inside a curated app store rather than the browser, where Coinhive's JavaScript miner was doing the same thing to web visitors.
First-order effects
- Calendar 2's developer loses the mining revenue channel outright — the $2,000 three-day haul is now dead income, and the app's monetization reverts to whatever non-mining premium tier remains.
- Apple establishes by enforcement, not announcement, that swapping users' CPU cycles for premium features violates Mac App Store guidelines — any developer considering the same swap now knows the outcome.
Second-order effects
- Other Mac developers eyeing mining-as-payment get their answer without having to try it themselves, pushing indie monetization back toward conventional freemium and subscription pricing inside the store.
- The distinction between opt-in and default-on mining becomes the battleground: Calendar 2 failed partly because mining ran by default, so any surviving variant would need explicit consent — a bar the browser-based Coinhive model never cleared either.
Third-order effects
- If platform gatekeepers hold this line while the crypto market turns, mining-as-monetization gets squeezed out of curated stores entirely and retreats to uncurated channels — the trajectory that later saw Coinhive shut down after the crypto crash and a Monero hard fork.
- The pattern points toward app stores codifying 'user resource use' as a review criterion alongside security and privacy, formalizing a boundary between legitimate background compute and cryptojacking that regulators have yet to define.
The trend: Curated app stores are closing the door on cryptocurrency mining as an in-app monetization model just as cryptojacking peaks elsewhere, forcing such schemes back toward browsers and unmanaged software.