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Tethering your iPhone to your notebook had been something that was left to those who are brave enough to jailbreak their iPhone. I say brave enough not because the jailbreaking is hard, but the tethering will violate your TOS with AT&T.

However, ever so briefly a new app showed its face in the App Store last night, it was a tethering app from Nullriver called NetShare. This app, which was selling for $9.99, would allow you to create a proxy and share your iPhones connection with your laptop. While this sounds pretty good, the app was quickly pulled from the store.

As best as I can tell it was available for less than an hour, and sadly I did not act quick enough in making my purchase.

It was quite surprising to see this app appear, but the removal does raise a few questions, mainly, for those who were smart enough to download it right away, what happens now? Will they get to keep it and use it, even though it may violate their AT&T TOS, or will Apple disable the app with DRM and refund the $9.99 that it cost?

It is a mystery as to why it was made available and removed, I cannot imagine it just being a mistake. Possibly it was pulled due to pressure from AT&T? But I am not sure they would have even reacted that quickly.

MacRumors has gotten some feedback from the developer who seems to still be just as in the dark as the rest of us.

"We’re not quite sure why Apple took down the application yet, we’ve received no communication from Apple thus far. NetShare did not violate any of the Developer or AppStore agreements. We’re hoping we’ll get some feedback from Apple tomorrow. Sorry to all the folks that couldn’t get it in time. We’ll do our best to try to get the application back onto the AppStore if at all possible. At the very least, I would hope Apple will allow it in countries where the provider does permit tethering."

While I would not count on it coming back quickly, here is the direct link (that was) for NetShare .

[UPDATE] It seems that the NetShare app from Nullriver is now back in the App Store, at least if you use the direct link, because its still not showing as a search. There has not been any update on the Nullriver website as to the status, so if you were looking to grab this, now may be a good time, because this may be just another cases">case like last night. Mine is downloading as I type this.