On Friday December 18th, 2009 Layar 3.0 was removed from the iPhone App store due to many crashes that the app was facing after an initial launch. According to the Dirk Groten the CTO of Layar he mentioned on their blog post:

We had issues already since the very first launch of the iPhone app. Unfortunately these issues were due to bad memory management decisions right from the start, something that we could not easily fix without completely re-engineering the app. There is some old code in there that is buggy and we don’t know exactly where the bug is. Since the app worked fine for 80% of the users (and on all our testing devices), we decided to move on to v3 before we would rebuild the framework of our app. We’ve tested v3 thoroughly internally and did not have any issues with crashes when submitting to the App Store. In fact, we still cannot reproduce the crashes that many of our users are reporting right now.

So back in late October 2009 Layar received $1 million in VC funding to continue to build their application and now with this launch it seems like they will need all hands on deck to make sure the app is working correctly for all of the iPhone users.

At times making such a decision of pulling an app can give you more negative feedback than positive feedback due to critics hassle of a company NOT to release a product before it is fully tested.

In this circumstance, I am glad that Layar chose to remove it and correct the app as the community of users were giving feedback of its instability. Perhaps in future releases Layar and other AR apps will crowdsource their product to multiple beta testers before an official release to have the app work for 100% of the users.