Apple’s tightly controlled App Store is teeming with scams
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
edit: to be clear, I'm not blaming Apple for not stopping these scams, at their scale, it's just practically impossible to stop every scam, but by making their unrealistic promise that everything on the app store is safe, they are misleading people into this false sense of security.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/30/trezor-...
If anything I think this story is just a prime example of why irreversible crypto transactions are an absolute nightmare for the general public. With the banking system this person would likely have recourse, with crypto it's "Whoops, your wallet key words got stolen, sorry, there go your life savings."
Also, this is just one example, the article itself has other ones.
No system is perfect, and when you get the realm of people submitting privileged information to third parties, all bets are always off. There is absolutely no way Apple could make guarantees about that. And they don't. Anywhere.
And no, saying that they review apps isn't a promise that it is "completely secure". That is absurd.
Trying for some security and confidence is a world removed from absolute security. The latter is effectively impossible.
This thread is farce. Anything if it gives people an opportunity to ply their rhetoric. It is a reminder that while HN has some good discussions, it has a lot of people who just want to make stupid arguments based on lies.
"But I thought you said TLS was completely secure? How could someripoffsite.com steal my cash?"
From apple.com/privacy:
"Every one of the more than 1.8 million apps on the App Store is required to follow strict privacy guidelines and report how it uses your data. And every app is rigorously reviewed by a team of experts at Apple."
I think it's a given that no one expects any QA or security process to perform perfectly. But there's some fuzzy line past which Apple's process fails to be "rigorous", and whatever that line is (or should be), courts will inevitably contrast the high expectations set by Apple's marketing with these real-world results when considering claims of negligence, liability, false advertising, anti-competitive behavior, etc.
Or in the alternative, Perhaps Apple should create a different tier of app review for any apps which claim to facilitate financial transactions (other than purchases, game currencies and microtransactions). This would encompass all apps for banking, investment and crypto. This tier should require a much higher verification of the developer's identity. The iOS sandbox should be further locked down to limit communication only to whitelisted IPs/domains which must all be under the control of the verified developer. And hey, you know what, let's even require the developer to submit the app in source code form.
> There's no practical way for Apple to prove that any app won't betray the user.
This is honestly a fundamental problem with both the App Review model, and the very concept of cryptocurrency (which for the record, I'm positively inclined towards, both technologically and ideologically):
- The Review model because the developer doesn't actually submit code, and static analysis tools can only go so far. Even if Apple started requiring source (opening many thorny IP liability issues), no reviewer can realistically audit every line. Even then, the mere fact WebViews are trivially common means a developer (or a malicious hacker) can always swap out the web backend with phishing attacks, credit card scams, etc.
- The cryptocurrency model because while it tells a story of "trustless" interaction and autonomy, in practice even the most knowledgable techies end up having to outsource trust to developers, firms, and communities. While it tends to be a safe bet to trust a highly-trafficked community GitHub over a random .ru site, (a) it still requires making a trust decision on imperfect information, and (b) non-technical users suffer an agent-principal dilemma when it comes time to make those decisions, which is a prerequisite to actually use crypto-currency. There are many, many shortcomings to the central-banking state currency model; but at least it has a pretty well-defined UX to the average "holder", and some hope of recourse in the event of a scam.
FWIW, browser-based wallets (with or without client-side storage) do exist, and would probably be used more heavily on iOS if Apple were to forbid native wallets. In which case, it's possible the guy who lost his life savings would have gotten scammed by a "trusted" web app instead.
Your private key is used to sign a transaction transfering your bitcoin to our account. We do not share your private key with anyone and it does not leave your phone.
They don’t. This is made up.
Summarized Apple lawyers said: "We can't offer alternative stores because they would be full of scams which would be bad for users. Our store is curated and safe for users.".
These are the very first words describing the App Store (https://www.apple.com/app-store/):
"The apps you love. From a place you can trust.
For over a decade, the App Store has proved to be a safe and trusted place to discover and download apps....And a big part of those experiences is ensuring that the apps we offer are held to the highest standards for privacy, security, and content."
The page then says this about security:
"Security for every app. At every level.
We ensure that apps come from known sources, are free of known malware, and haven’t been tampered with at the time of installation or launch."
And this about trust:
"Apps must adhere to our guidelines.
When you download an app, it should work as promised. Which is why human App Reviewers ensure that the apps on the App Store adhere to our strict app review standards. Our App Store Review Guidelines require apps to be safe, provide a good user experience, comply with our privacy rules, secure devices from malware and threats, and use approved business models."*
Approval doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Just because they don’t detect a scam doesn’t mean they approve of what it does - it is still in breach of contract with Apple.
If they had said anything like that you’d be be able to quote them.
The problem is that if you are associated with a crime committed in the United States in any way (besides being a very distant third-person witness with no associations whatsoever to the individual), and you are not a crime victim or an individual reporting the crime, you are almost always considered to be an _accessory to the crime_ which is a misdemeanor (go to jail for up to 365 days) or felony (go to prison for over 365 days) state level (has parole for prisoners) or federal level (effectively has no parole for prisoners) criminal offense, which the police will arrest you for and charge you with, while the person committing the misdemeanor/felony gets charged with whatever crime they perpetrated.
For example, if your "acquaintance" shoplifts at a store and gets caught, and you don't stop or report them: you will get charged as being an accessory to a crime and you're going to jail.
Also, if you are involved in an altercation in any way, the cop can put everyone involved in handcuffs and charge them, even if you never got physically or verbally violent.
There are also catch-all laws in the US that one can go to prison for, basically for acting in "bad faith" but never actually doing anything else criminally wrong.
This is why you never talk to the police, ever. They will twist your statements in the wildest ways imaginable. If you get pulled over by the police, you should practice, every single time, saying as little as possible to the officer.
This has never happened to me personally, but, everyone needs to know this: If the police in America start questioning you and it gets into a detailed discussion, you stop right there and say: "No comment: I need to talk to my lawyer first."
As someone who used to be a criminal prosecutor in the US, I would be very interested in seeing citations to whatever statute you are referencing.
As far as being charged as an accessory, you generally need to have known that a crime was or would be occurring, and to have provided some form of assistance. That doesn't need to be direct actions in the act, it could be financial or emotional assistance.
And no one is going to prison over shoplifting unless we're talking about repeat offenders or large amounts of cash. Let alone just happening to know someone who shoplifted and failing to report them.
Having said that, definitely don't talk to the police without a lawyer present.
Not just facilitating. They get 30% for it.
Arguing about the $99/year developer fee is a pointless rabbit hole. You might as well also accuse Apple of selling the developers an iPhone and a Mac for developing the scam app. And then don't forget to accuse the electrical grid operator of selling electricity to the scammers.
Arguing about the $99/year developer fee is a pointless rabbit hole.
Do you seriously think that Apple values the promise of a scammer’s $99 fee recurring next year more then they would value having fewer scams in their store?
I genuinely believe you’re being unserious here.
If it was an open market (no review process), and they just took enough to cover operations and processing fees, I can see them being blameless, but if you are going to review apps, you need to actually review them.
That’s exacerbated when products are counterfeits and legit brands get pissed off, but it would got the same for unsafe products as well I’d guess.
Amazon getting their provisions corrected could make a positive precedent for digital goods as well.
Perhaps if Apple was held responsible for these kinds of expensive mishaps they would be more honest in their marketing. Maybe. And that's kind of the point of this article. :-P
[0]: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/554790-cook-says-apple...
If the responsibility is too impossible (and I'm fine saying that it is), then their paternalism shouldn't be called out and their reputation knocked down a rung or two. Instead, they get to keep a reputation which is far better than the other megacorps'.
Totally off topic: that phrasing made my brain skip a beat. I've always seen "called out" used to convey confrontation, especially in a public manner like "He called out Apple on Twitter for their paternalism." Turns out a similarly common use is the more general "to bring attention to" in a positive way.
I think this is what having strong marketing gets you. You can see from the defence on HN/Twitter where most people would be fine with Apple having a control over all their devices and aren't afraid of the growing dominance of a single company.
It also enables you to export those private keys so that you can keep a backup in the event of a hardware failure, because all hardware eventually fails.
It doesn’t lock you into their platform / ecosystem exclusively. It doesn’t prevent you from using that backup elsewhere.
I know they claim it is "the most secure" app store, which I am not sure what they use to back that up, it does seem to be one of the most secure platforms, it has my highest trust but I don't completely trust it.
As others have said I do believe a curated app is is more secure than an un curated one or no app store, but nothing is perfect and there is a trade off for that curation and tight control.
I guess I'm victim-shaming here, but using mobile apps for large financial arrangements, no matter how trustworthy the app claims to be is a bad move. For this type of stuff you would use a clean computer with no known malware present, and use a privacy-aware browser like Firefox or Brave preferably with `HTTPS Everywhere` addon installed with the EASE feature turned on to avoid plaintext leaks / traffic going over HTTP.
At the end of the day people are responsible for not doing business with shady stores or people. But the idea that a single QR code can empty my entire account is sobering...
Large transactions need extra special care. You need a trusted device with a trusted OS and a trusted browser, preferably with `EASE` turned on in HTTPS Everywhere so plaintext secrets can't leak out of your machine. You also need to vet the HTTPS Everywhere extension and ensure it came from the official addons site. You would also harden the OS. Using Linux is preferable over Windows 10 since Windows is targeted heavily by malware gangs.
There's a lot more wrong in this scenario than just the app store. If someone is going to be so amazingly careless with half a million dollars...
So basically no technical or smarts are needed to get to this situation. If anything this suggests the person is your fairly average "dumb" user.
* I said "Bitcoin" and not "cryptocurrency" intentionally. Because the jury is still own on the latter, but the former most certainly will not be the CC of the future IMHO due to its massive privacy shortcomings, among other things.
Are they managing to keep it safe is independent of that claim and we can ask why are those getting through.
It's the most profitable course of action, that's all there is to it.
But to address your question: if apple allowed other stores, they could be significantly more picky about what's allowed on their store. This would consequently increase the security for people only using the official store.
This is obviously a no-go however, as that would be less profitable then the current situation.
also you do understand businesses need to make profit, and keeping their customers happy is definitely the right way to do it in my book. so given your logic here, how do you explain all of the other privacy features apple gives away for free?
Why not? You should blame them. They have positioned themselves as the gatekeepers. Why? To extract profit from application developers. However, such a powerful position also comes with expectations and responsibilities. They should absolutely not be allowed to get away with gross negligence.
We absolutely must blame them every single time they fail to keep malicious software out. They are responsible for that man's losses and should fully indemnify him. Had they not approved that software, it would not have happened.
Nobody cares about their "scale" or how "difficult" it is for them to determine what is and isn't malicious. They have assumed that responsibility by gatekeeping their devices and therefore any failures are directly attributable to them.
The fact is, no matter how much time/energy/effort they spend, they will never eliminate all scams, scams would just become more and more sophisticated. This doesn't mean, they should just give up, but having been through the review process, they are already doing quite a bit.
So that would mean, they will make it much harder for apps to get approved in the store (and it's already a very painful process), so you'd only end up with apps from large developers which is not ideal.
We are seeing a similar dynamic with Youtube which has become rather "ban-happy" as in they don't want to take risks, so would rather ban content than try to reduce false positives, because at a certain scale, you just can't identify content with good precision/recall.
Absolutely. Apple should be afraid of holding the gatekeeper position. Anyone should.
When people can install and use whatever they want, safety becomes their responsibility. They should open up their platform and let people do their own due dilligence. If they assume that responsibility and then neglect it, they absolutely can and should be blamed for any problems.
In contrast, it's legal to jailbreak an iPhone.
Protections? Encryption is protection. Address space randomization is protection. This Apple review process? This is just humans failing to do what's expected of them. Also known as negligence.
which is why he hasn't placed himself in the position of "arbiter of what's right and wrong on phones", the way Apple has with their App Store.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/7/9470551/volvo-self-drivin...
It's not about adding layers of protection or not; it's about being transparent with your customers about how effective those layers actually are.
> Because we offer nearly two million apps — and we want you to feel good about using every single one of them.
> Apps must adhere to our guidelines.
> You should never have to worry about inappropriate content.
> Every day, moderators review worldwide App Store charts for quality and accuracy.
All of these are far stronger claims than I would be comfortable making about the current state of the store.
That is the most ridiculous implication.
'We did not expect anyone to read the terms of the product, so we shouldn't have to deliver on what we promised.'
That is not resonable.
Apple is using weezle-words like "should" which gives them wiggle room, but I guess it will be up to a court to decide.
I think about 0 out of the first 100 people I know that I think of have heard any version of those claims (maybe 5 now since a few read HN). It’s probably not even a top 10,000 trafficked page on their site.
Do you have any ties against apple or for a competitor?
You're not perfect at anything you do. Does that make you useless? Of course not.
As a gatekeeper? Yes, yes it does; hence why there shouldn't be any gatekeepers.
The appropriate metric for safety of an app store is not whether you can get attacked, but rather how many users - proportional to all users - get attacked every year.
This is the second person in this thread to think using an open source repo as an example carries weight. There are less users, therefore less malware is released here in the first place and then there’s less load for the malware filters for that that does get through.
My comment stands, why target f-droid?
> But we have historically seen issues with those repos haven’t we?
Care to elaborate?
Here’s one issue we’ve had with these repos:
https://lwn.net/Articles/295406/
Then there’s things like NPM that’s broken quite a few production deployments in spectacularly public ways.
Apple's filters are clearly garbage.
Using linux as an example here doesn’t work.
They must be focusing on the wrong things then. Certain categories are filled with scam apps at the top ranks, including scam subscriptions.
Nobody wants Apple to be judge and jury, we have judges and juries for that, but it would be nice if they could tell us who to go after when we have to.
If they can't do that, I don't think its unreasonable for us to ask Apple to be responsible any losses, then let Apple seek compensation for their losses from the app publisher.
But I don’t like that kind of approach, so therefore I would be careful in demanding Apple to fix the problem. Any fix they come up with, would likely cause troubles for small players.
Sandboxing is a step in the right direction, as are various levels of things like code signing and even Windows Defender-esque systems that maintain lists of known malicious apps, authors etc and prevent them from running.
It also helps not to have an easy monetization scheme for malicious actors, either. Making it easy to give them money, and even sign you up for fraudulent subscriptions so you keep giving them money, is a mistake.
An actually user-friendly system would look at the apps that you're making payments with, and ask whether or not you want to keep subscriptions that you don't appear to be using much. This doesn't happen, though, because it is in no one's interests but the users' to help save them money.
I also think it's easy to forget just how much Apple could spend on this if they actually cared
All cryptocurrency transfers (between digital wallets) are recorded in a public ledger (the blockchain).
Anybody can read it. But only those with the correct encryption keys to a wallet can write to it (add a record). Once someone steals the encryption key of your wallet A, it can be used to access your wallet and add a record to the public ledger that all the cryptocurrency of wallet A has been transferred to wallet B. This record cannot be changed by anyone.
But since every transaction on the ledger is a public record that anyone can read, one can theoretically track where the cryptocurrency goes from one wallet to another. This can be used to catch a thief by the police. Anyone can create a digital wallet anonymously, but to convert it into real currency you need to provide your real life identity and bank account to a crypto-exchange. This is the point where someone becomes exposed and loses their anonymity, and hence can be identified by the law.
"The apps you love. From a place you can trust."
"For over a decade, the App Store has proved to be a safe and trusted place to discover and download apps."
"Every day, moderators review worldwide App Store charts for quality and accuracy.”
"Dedicated to trust and safety.”
"Apps must adhere to our guidelines.”
"From more videos to rankings and reviews, there are loads of ways to help you pick the app that’s right for you.”
"ensuring that the apps we offer are held to the highest standards for privacy, security, and content. Because we offer nearly two million apps — and we want you to feel good about using every single one of them."
"When you download an app, it should work as promised. Which is why human App Reviewers ensure that the apps on the App Store adhere to our strict app review standards. Our App Store Review Guidelines require apps to be safe, provide a good user experience, comply with our privacy rules, secure devices from malware and threats, and use approved business models."
Of course not, because lying for Apple is common business practice nowadays.
That statement from the courts has allowed all sorts of lying in marketing.
To be scrupulouly fair, the "for Apple" is 100% redundant.
> Apple used to have a button [1], just under the ratings and reviews section in the App Store, that said “report a problem,” which allowed users to report inappropriate apps. Based on discussions among Apple customers on Apple’s own website [2], the feature was removed some time around 2016.
Why would they remove the ability for people to easily report apps?
1: https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https://www.dummies.com...
2: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6999097#:~:text=Apple%2...
Presumably for a reason. I don't work at Apple, so to spitball some possibilities:
* The "report a problem" button was being misused and had worse signal than other metrics Apple added.
* Legal or Public Relations pressed to remove the button because only a portion of reports were actioned (possibly because of the above point) and it was causing legal/reputational damage.
Reasons could be:
- nobody uses that button
- people use the button, but mostly not for its intended purpose.
I would guess a fairly generic “report a problem” button would attract lots of messages of type 2. I can see people complain there about missing features, ask support questions, etc. I would bet that, to many, it wasn’t clear that button let you send a message to Apple.
It's probably a cost thing, they didn't want to pay a team to go through the reports.
https://i.imgur.com/gaLH26P.png
Tapping the report concern option gives me ability to report it:
https://i.imgur.com/JHLC4Hp.png
I am curious if the newer devices are able to long press a review to get the same option.
Also not sure if something similar is available for apps?
This stuff happens despite the tight control, not because of it. If it was uncurated, it would be a cesspool like the Google play store (or ...shudder... the "competing" stores).
Having a paid app that reads QR codes is not necessarily a scam.
The article admits that 2/3 of the apps they reported were taken down.
The article claims: "If consumers were to have access to alternative app stores or other methods of distributing software, Apple would be a lot more likely to take this problem more seriously"
Yet then says: "Apple isn’t the only company that struggles with this issue: They’re also on Google’s Play Store, which is available on its Android mobile operating system. But unlike Apple, Google doesn’t claim that its Play Store is curated."
...so lack of competing stores or presence of (imperfect) curation is not the cause, because Google did not even begin to attempt to solve this problem. Play store apps, unless proven otherwise, are generally malware you carry with yourself every day, with potential access to everything in your device because the OS is nowhere near locked down compared to Apple counterpart. Hell, most Android devices ship with undeletable malware from vendors etc.
Apple model is broken, but it is the least broken out there. Instead of admitting that, article tries to be a hit piece trying to make the Apple model look worse for the ongoing trial.
They've distorted our free market into "Apple's market".
They tax ingress to 50% of Americans and don't let you establish a relationship with your customers. Beyond that, they make you dance through hoops to build and deploy software.
It's a travesty that they won.
If this continues, businesses will be paying Apple for customers brought to them by Apple iCar.
This would almost be true if users weren't forced to use the App Store to install native apps in the first place. If I had a choice to use a store like F-Droid on my iPhone, I wouldn't be complaining. However, being forced to use a broken system is still a complaint, even if it's marginally more secure than it's competitors.
Furthermore, Apple trusts the user to decide if Facebook can steal their data: why can't they trust the user to install third party apps? If they don't effectively communicate the danger beforehand, that's their failure. Otherwise, Apple is just locking off functionality to me, which is insulting considering I pay a premium for their devices that I expect to be recouped on the software side of things. That's their business model, if you don't like it then you should argue with them, not me.
There are plenty of valid reasons to object to Apple’s revenue model, but the avoidance of piracy seems like a bridge too far.
I'm glad I don't have to pay a 30% tax on revenue. Or jump though insane hurdles to deploy my software.
It sure feels free.
Thankfully, it's only 50% of Americans, or half the market, that's locked up behind this protection racket.
I'm sorry but this is complete bullshit. Your data on Android appears to be about a decade old.
But seriously, Apple postures for control. They have a death grip on our industry, and it's up to the DOJ and legal system to rend it asunder.
Apple does not deserve to have a singular App store with tight controls. It's not their right. And they've proven the sort of anticompetitive antics they choose to take when they have such power.
Break them open.
And how are those vendor app actually malware? Their presence can be annoying but they aren't malware.
Both platforms push users toward app vendors that really don't care about their privacy.
Users themselves have various levels of sophistication, and unsophisticated scams have plenty of victims.
I would argue that the reputational damage is worth more, strictly monetarily. Apple is an incredibly valuable brand, estimated in the hundereds of billions of dollars[0], and they are understandably protective of it. If <2% of the top 1000 apps are scams (from the article), and Apple periodically catches scams and helps unwind them (2/3rds of the apps the Post reported were removed), I don't think Apple is making all that much money here. Remember that Apple does't keep its 30% cut when a transaction is refunded.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264875/brand-value-of-th...
There may have been some smaller isolated stories in the past, but the truth about App Store scams is really only now coming to light - and so Apple’s calculus might be changing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/technology/pressure-on-ap...
Thanks.
The question isn't weather or not happens, it's weather it's worth the enormous sacrifice of personal computing:
No self hosting dev environments
The dev environments you can find are pretty terrible (often in weird ways you don't notice until you've spent a day working around them.)
Apple decides moderation rules for every chat service with push notifications on the platform. They kick you off the platform if you're not up to their standards.
An extension to the last one is that Apple is able to (and does!) silence political ideas on the platform they don't like. They've gone as far as censoring Xscreensaver on iOS because they don't like the political thoughts people might have watching it. This is a major threat to democracy weather you currently agree with their positions or not.
No innovation is allowed. Want to try a WIMP style GUI? Nope, Apple will kick you off. Even if you don't explicitly violate the rules odd looking GUIs are sometimes assumed to use private APIs and can result in a rejection.
There are many (probably infinitely) more major sacrifices but I'm tired of listing them.
> but it is the least broken out there.
No! Debian and F-droid work extremely well, the difference here is that the community is maintaining the repo and they require everything be done out in the open.
It does if you are Epic, or Jeff Bezos.
I would suggest you use an Android smartphone from the last 5 years before making a comment like this.
I use both iOS and Android devices on a regular basis and both the App Store and Play Store are cesspools. I would go even further and say that the App Store is more obnoxious in that it serves me a half page ad whenever I search for an app.
At least on Android, I have the choice to not use the Play Store. That is not even possible when I use iOS.
It’s a real problem, but the headline is sensationalized.
Do you have a single fact to back this up, or did you just read it from Apple's marketing?
Curated-list discovery (versus algorithmic discovery such as “top of the week”) tell the user that these apps have been hand selected by Apple for being quality apps. In general though it turns out that these lists are more often lists of apps that make Apple significant amounts of money, changing what Apple is incentivized to display. Take for example the only way they allow discovery of highly rated apps - the “Everyone’s Favorites (highly rated apps)” list: https://i.imgur.com/7D2hvwO.jpg. The top spot is held by Tinder, which currently has a 3.8/5 rating. This list very clearly isn’t a list of highly rated apps, only highly used / large money makers for Apple. We see clearly that Apple prioritizes monetary return over accurate results.
Search is another example of this. Most search algorithms are black boxes - inputs go in, results come out that we expect to be able to trust. Searching for “Samsung” should bring up apps from Samsung, but instead they return mostly free third party apps with IAP up sells rather than the official apps.
Overall the App Store is designed for monetary return, not safety or user trust. Until Apple decides that the long term image / trustworthiness of the App Store is more important than short term gain, I don’t see these issues changing.
The claim that 'every app is reviewed for security' should be a giant liability problem.
The store model is a huge winfall of profits precisely because they don't have to do any of this.
Realistically, if we use brick-and-mortar as a reference ... it might very well be that if you want to do something 'commercial' on a platform, literally using Apple's payment infrastructure, there's probably going to actually have to be more rigorous insight. This will cost Apple a lot, and probably cost sellers a lot as well, I can see it costing $X dollars for the review process then $Y for every upgrade, possibly Z days delay in payments and possibly esceleating % whitheld given market size, until AAA+ confidence rating.
All of the ugly things we see in regular finance exist basically for this reason (i.e. VISA chargebacks, bank freezes, paypal holds) etc. etc..
A lot of profits are raised by ignoring these realities.
Same goes for Amazon.
It doesn't follow that, since some bad things have gotten past the gatekeeper, we should get rid of the gatekeeper.
- A lot of users let their guard down because they blindly trust Apple’s marketing, and scammers take advantage of that.
- The fake ratings and reviews are making this even worse by leading people to believe other people have found some of these scams valuable.
I can see how a more trustworthy ratings system and a more honest marketing of the App Store for what it really is, could lead to fewer scams, even if Apple doesn’t control the App Review process so tightly - or doesn’t control it all.
This is the "a lot of scammers are better than a few sophisticated scammers" argument, which I disagree with. Users themselves have varying levels of sophistication (unsophisticated scams work just fine on some people), and there are other mechanisms like chargebacks which can unwind damage after the fact.
> The fake ratings and reviews are making this even worse by leading people to believe other people have found some of these scams valuable.
I have no insight into how well Apple is doing combating fake reviews, but no anti-abuse system is perfect. There is the same question here: would things be worse if Apple didn't police reviews at all.
The App Store is broken but it is the least broken of the app stores.
> Apple used to have a button, just under the ratings and reviews section in the App Store, that said “report a problem,” which allowed users to report inappropriate apps. Based on discussions among Apple customers on Apple’s own website, the feature was removed some time around 2016.
Why would they remove the ability for people to easily report apps?
If you "created" the equivalent in real life, in a 3D physical, brick-and-mortar sense, the law would generally be strictly enforced, and you would be able to get away with far less. That is, unless you are FAANG, which lobbies the US government--and other governments around the world for laws that give them an extremely huge "competitive advantage" over startups and mom-and-pop type establishments, along with allowing them to be "in compliance" but not adhering to the actual "spirit of the law". The actual spirit of the law is what the purpose of the law is in the first place. It is about affording people inherent rights.
The European Union has halfway decent laws on paper at best, that are extremely poorly enforced. Also, FAANG always finds a way to evade a penalty, anywhere in the world. The EU needs to step up its game, and I think they will, but of course, it will never be quite enough.
This seems like the simplest thing to fix right away.
It'd be like only having two options for cars (Ford and Tesla), and forcing restaurants, stores, etc. to pay 30% of their gross revenue to Tesla for their having brought you.
It's truly bizarro world.
Make no pretense. This isn't about protecting consumers, this is about Apple's control. They want to install toll booths onto every road to reaching Americans, and they're defending it like Omaha beach. No browsers, no runtimes, no relationship with your customers.
(I swear to god if I hear the "but Nintendo" argument again... These aren't toys. Apple captured 50% of ingress to US customers and their commerce, and they tightly control and tax it. Illegal af.)
Don't ask for censorship to protect a brand you value. Apple is not beyond reproach.
This discussion can be about the shitty App Store approval process and the shitty App Store developers without getting into the financials.
Of course, that wouldn't be good for Apple: Apple would inevitably have to throw out some of the legit apps in the course of QA and weather more criticism; Apple would lose that revenue and their vig; and Apple would no longer have as many apps in the app store.
Like Amazon, Apple has demonstrated that they prefer that some of their customers get fleeced, as long as they get their cut.
"1 million apps and untold billions in revenue, but only 2% of the top apps are scammy... you can figure out which ones, because we didn't bother.."
One problem is this weekly schedule: people do not check cc statements on weekly schedule. Also they should sent an iMessage a couple of days before the change.
But then users might disable the auto-renew, and Apple wouldn't get their cut.
The few times I’ve accidentally left a subscription running I’ve been able to go to reportaproblem.apple.com and ask for a refund and each time it’s worked without any drama.
Now I thought this was crappy, and I wanted the "Wrong" sound clip as said by Trump, so last week for fun I made a Wrong button that has no ads, plays the actual "Wrong" clip from Trump, and costs $1 as a one-time payment.
I got rejected, because the functionality was too minimal, and they said that I should add features. Hmm. It feels like their approval process is pretty inconsistent, kinda arbitrary. I kinda want to write back to them to figure out what exactly the existing "Wrong Button!" app has that I'm missing, like is ads mandatory? But also I feel like it's not worth my time. Frustrating.
We also know from trial documents that they decided ~500ish people was enough to review the millions of apps and app revisions in existence. I don’t even have to do the math and I know that is nowhere near sufficient. Apple clearly is either clueless about this, or does not care, and either one of those is a huge problem. It also means that almost everything they claim about the security of the App Store itself is not true (rather, a substantial portion of the security comes from the OS and device, not necessarily the review).
A iOS developer pays $19 for a remote control app on the App Store and defaults to blaming Samsung. Steve Jobs should get a posthumous award for how well his reality distortion field has held up after his death.
He said it was a mistake to think the app store review process was good. How is that blaming Samsung?
My point being a developer does not necessarily make this person somehow less susceptible to app store scams.
But… what I think would be nice to see from Apple is better visibility into those ratings and reviews so users have more to go on than a single number.
Will that alone prevent these from happening? probably not, but this isn’t a fight that can be won with a single battle/weapon.
The article didn’t give total volume numbers, but 48M USD seems like a drop in the bucket. Only 2% of top 1000 apps? I’d love to see the numbers but I doubt the Play store is even in that ballpark.
Like everyone, I would love to see a world where no one gets scammed. Unfortunately there are humans involved so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Apple store fake app stole man's life savings in Bitcoin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26956568 - April 2021 (89 comments)
Apple’s $64 billion-a-year App Store isn’t catching the most egregious scams - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26888190 - April 2021 (6 comments)
$5M/year VPN scam on the AppStore - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26807566 - April 2021 (6 comments)
A top-grossing scam on the App Store - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26794228 - April 2021 (269 comments)
iOS developer who drew attention to App Store scams is now suing Apple - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26504158 - March 2021 (45 comments)
Apple cracks down on ‘irrationally high prices’ as App Store scams are exposed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26198098 - Feb 2021 (5 comments)
Apple’s App Store is hosting multi-million dollar scams - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26069660 - Feb 2021 (8 comments)
Developer exposes multiple million-dollar scam apps on the App Store - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26067364 - Feb 2021 (8 comments)
How to spot a $5M/year scam on the App Store, in 5 minutes flat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26054673 - Feb 2021 (13 comments)
Apple watch keyboard developer put off by app store scammers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25986515 - Feb 2021 (320 comments)
Apple Pulling High-Grossing Scammy Offer Subscription Apps Off the App Store - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18260514 - Oct 2018 (73 comments)
How to scam and get 67k all 5 Star reviews on the app store - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16034764 - Dec 2017 (36 comments)
$80k/month App Store Scam - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14526156 - June 2017 (195 comments)
Don’t Be Fooled: The Mac App Store Is Full of Scams - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13052127 - Nov 2016 (16 comments)
It reminds me of the "pirates vs DRM" thing.
Maybe the headline is meant to be tongue in cheek contradictory, but if it's teeming with scams, isn't that saying it's not so tightly controlled?
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...