"That is true in a sense that a malicious app could do the same thing that APE does, though it would be complicated to get all those pieces set up. The thing that APE provides a convenient framework for that. What most apps can't do is to look around in any user's running app's memory space and do whatever it wants with what it finds. Normal apps can't go poking around in another app's memory space at all. APE lets you write code to do that and a malicious coder could use this for lots and lots of bad things." You ever hear of mach_inject? http://rentzsch.com/mach_inject/