Last month we reported on the launch of Evi, a new iPhone (iTunes link) and Android app (link) which was very Siri-like in its capabilities. Maybe it was too good at acting like Siri?

Yes, Evi can’t do Siri’s trick of adding things to your iPhone Calendar or hook into reminders. But, ask “How do I make apple pie?” and Evi provides a list of recipes with web links. Siri can’t give you a direct answer and just asks whether you want to search the web. Perhaps it’s the fact that Evi is pretty damn good, and doesn’t look a million miles away from Siri, that Apple has told True Knowledge that it is going to pull Evi from the App Store. Wait, what?

Apple has approved versions of Evi for the appstore multiple times – including post-Siri. However, the word on the street at Mobile World Congress is that there have been ominous signs that Apple was unhappy with the competition, including the one update True Knowledge submitted after launch (which merely added a historical searches feature). This has taken three weeks and counting to get approved.

On Friday evening True Knowledge had a call from Apple representative Richard Chipman. (If you Google Richard Chipman’s name you’ll find he is also the Apple rep that does the controversial calls about apps).

He told True Knowledge that Apple was “going to pull Evi from the appstore” as it was similar to Siri.

The rule being cited is number 8.3 in the App stro T&Cs” “Apps which appear confusingly similar to an existing Apple product or advertising theme will be rejected”.

Ironically, both Siri and Evi license Nuance’s voice recognition technology. But Siri doesn’t have Evi’s True Knowledge’s search engine behind it.

True Knowledge CEO William Tunstall-Pedoe told me: “I don’t think it takes too much of a leap of the imagination to realise that ‘confusingly similar’ is code for ‘competitive with’