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Comment by jarcane | Hacker News Reader

Just like they have with Play Store.

Just a couple of days ago, the #1 app in the Top Grossing chart on Play Store was "Funny Voice Changer", which is a sketchy app aimed at children that gets you to sign up for a 3 day free trial then charges $280. It has a 4.1 stars rating with mostly obviously fake reviews. I see now it's down to #29 on the chart, but it's still there.

I understand vetting everything manually would take unreasonable amounts of manpower but maybe you should check that literally the #1 grossing app in you store is not a scam?

Perhaps if the store made more money, they would have motivation to do something about it...

If the store made more money, why would they do anything? If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Now, if the store started making less money because of scams...

Because of the prospect of losing that income stream. Their ad services are very well managed. AFAIK they're not making much/any money from the stores now so it makes sense they're not fixing it, or am I wrong?

It's Google. It doesn't matter how profitable something is, if it's incompatible with their org chart they'll let anything rot.

Chicken and egg. They would probably make more money if the store was more curated. At the moment it's hard to discover apps in the sea of spam and fake apps. As an example, there are literally hundreds of QR code readers, most of which are probably based on the same library but with very different levels of security. In fact, one of the top QR readers asks for very invasive permissions without any justification

Agreed completely, Google seems to be totally lacking any resemblance of vision or direction. Hard to overcome the chicken/egg problem with that...

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