$80k/month App Store Scam

[blhack]

This is particularly annoying while my beta is "waiting for review" so I can have the privilege of giving it to a few beta testers.

How does apple not expect that annoying developers with their app store process (so much so that things like this exist: https://fastlane.tools/), AND charging them 30% AND apparently not actually reviewing anything about the apps making it into their store isn't going to eventually drive people away from it?

(Why yes, I am cranky over the amount of hoops I had to jump through to get to the point of asking apple for permission to put my beta on my co-founder's iPhone)

[blunte]

#1 - Apple has a quarter of a trillion dollars in cash. You would think they could afford intelligent, reasonable app review teams. Clearly they don't bother, based on the complaints from honest developers and evidence of pure scams like this.

#2 - Average computer/phone users are willfully ignorant. I would say stupid, but that's a judgement call (even though I think it's true). Someone with knowledge can advise them, but they cannot be bothered with all that fuss. They'd rather ignore sound advice and push buttons. After all, look at the who runs the country and the complacence of many of its people.

Have you ever had a friend who was a lawyer? Did you ever get some traffic ticket and think, "Hey, I'll ask Bob if he can help me handle this!"? I'm guilty of this once in a while. But "average users" are guilty of doing this to technical people all the fucking time. And when we advise them of behaviors to change to avoid future incidents, they nod and agree, but then repeat the stupid behavior later.

Sorry for the rant, but perhaps it's time to just start replying to scammed/screwed users with, "Oh wow, that's really unfortunate. I guess you'll have to go buy a new phone/computer." Maybe that will jar them into actually using their brains.

* Edit for wine-related typos.

[notadoc]

How does garbage like this get through the App Store? I thought Apple was notoriously strict on approvals?

Also, do people still use the App Store? I don't think I have casually browsed for apps in 5 years or more.

[DanBlake]

Years and years ago when we first launched a video chat room app, they denied it. They said it wasnt allowed to have a listing of rooms. So we simply had the app request a file from our server on app launch. If the file was present, we hid rooms. Once we got approved we just removed the file. We kept that up for a few months but it seemed like after the initial approval apple never bothered to check again so we just abandoned it after that.

[yoodenvranx]

> How does garbage like this get through the App Store

Yes, exactly. How is there no-one at Apple/Google checking the top list of their app stores once a day to weed out all the crap?

[giarc]

It frustrating. I tried to get a legit app through the app store that had a link to our website where people could sign up. The iOS app is for customers with accounts, so it made sense to us to have a link where users could see our website (discover our Saas product and sign up). Apple repeatedly rejected it since they wanted their 30% cut of our revenue. So we now have to make it clear in our description that this app if for current customers only.

However, these scamming apps make it through.

[alaskamiller]

  But I’ve also never clicked on a Google Ad, yet Google somehow rode Adwords to $700 billion dollars today.

[chrisseaton]

> do people still use the App Store

Yes people spend billions of dollars a month on the App Store.

[Buge]

Maybe they submitted it 100 times before it got approved. With the money at stake, the effort is worth it.

[sausman]

I was wondering the same thing.. Maybe the developer was able to remotely flip a switch after the app went through approval to change its behavior and app review didn't catch it? What's really surprising is how long it's been out (almost 2 months)

[htormey]

Maybe they used some code push tech similar to what rollout used to update the app after review.

[imron]

This was my first thought too. How do these apps even make it past review.

[chatmasta]

These App Store ads are the Wild West right now. I've seen multiple cases where I search an exact app name, and that app's competitor has the top "spot" due to buying an ad. It's like if you searched for Uber and saw an ad for Lyft above it.

How long will apple allow this? At the very least it should be impossible to bid on trademarked terms, and no ad should ever outrank an exact match result.

[jasongill]

Contrary to what other commenters believe, this is the way that all PPC systems work - search for "Uber" on Google, Bing, etc and you're guaranteed to see a Lyft ad.

[reboog711]

Ignoring any ethical concerns you may have...

Advertising has often been comparing yourself to other brands. As one real world example: The Pepsi Challenge from the 80s. People drank Coke and Pepsi blindly and chose which one they liked better.

It is not illegal in the US and not inherently a misuse of trademark law. I'd be surprised if you were to tell me that Uber and Lyft are not buying ads against each other's search terms.

[pavel_lishin]

Isn't it more like searching for Uber, and seeing an ad for Ober, that's advertising an app that look exactly like Uber's?

[yvsong]

Historically Apple's primary strength is product quality. This kind of apps should not pass the App Store review. The App Store should not allow ads, since they reduce overall product quality. Google web search is different. Google does not control web contents. Google's primary product/service is the free web search, and they have to make a profit from it. App Store search is a tiny part of Apple's product/service. Apple makes tons of money from other parts.

Steve Jobs was the creative artist in the IT industry, and obsessive in product quality. It may be time to ask the question "What would Steve Jobs have done?"

[usaphp]

> it's like if you searched for uber and ad for lyft above.

When I search for lyft I actually see uber ad above: https://imgur.com/gallery/zQz7e

[_pmf_]

One thing of note: the spelling errors are deliberate to let only the most gullible people through to the last step (improving the odds that the person in question will not know how to report this as a scam or initiate a chargeback). The same tactics are used by ads on porn sites[0].

[0] Or so I have heard ... from a friend

[slig]

There's a paper from Microsoft IIRC explaining this behavior. I'm on mobile right now, otherwise I'd find it and link it here.

[prodmerc]

Similar thing with long sales pages. Reader doesn't know exactly what he wants, isn't convinced, but with a lot of filler mumbo jumbo and some images, maybe a video, you can get them to buy on the spot.

[pthreads]

Interesting! I was wondering what the reason was. My first instinct was to assume the developer just used Google Translate or something like that and perhaps not being an English speaker was bad at spelling too. But based on your comment I am not intrigued with the possibility of it being a deliberate tactic.

[kennydude]

Some keywords need to return help topics instead. If you search "virus scanner", Apple should tell users their device really doesn't need one

[downandout]

There has got to be more to this story. People would refute accidental purchases of $400/mo. Perhaps these guys are using tech support scams etc to drive traffic to this thing, or they're simply using stolen credit card numbers to setup Apple App Store accounts. Perhaps that's why the spelling and layout is so bad...it's possible that they don't intend anybody outside of themselves to actually use it.

[ceejayoz]

> There has got to be more to this story. People would refute accidental purchases of $400/mo.

There are plenty of folks out there who pay little to no attention to what's being billed on their cards.

As an example: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14838642/ns/technology_and_science...

[codedokode]

I agree, that looks suspicious. Why people would need adware removal on iPhone when there is no malware in the first place? And judging by app design it doesn't look like its developer cares about conversion.

[zrth]

You could even force people on the street to subscribe to the app instead of mugging them. This solved the problem that more and more people are cashless. Also you don't have to worry about selling contraband.

[rco8786]

> it's possible that they don't intend anybody outside of themselves to actually use it.

Then why run the ads?

[htormey]

wow, I'm pretty pissed off by this. One of my clients is a medical marijuana startup and we have had to jump through so many hoops to stay compliant with Apple's random app store rules. We have been rejected on several occasions and pulled from the app store.

I also had another app that was accepted into the app store then when I pushed an update release I was informed that my logo had to change because it used Apple's camera emoji. I only did this because another popular app did the same thing (down for lunch). In order to stay compliant, I had to change my logo.

I'm fine with said rules existing as in theory they are meant to protect lay customers from junk like this. How on earth did this thing make it through a review process that's so hard on some apps?

I wish Apple would apply it's rules and vetting with more consistency.

[tyingq]

I was under the impression that the approval process for the app store was somewhat rigorous.

How did this app get through that?

[valuearb]

Apple is rigorous (I've been rejected close to 20 times). But app review is also hard, especially when there is a flood of new app submissions every week, day and hour. Validating that an app does what it says it does isn't really what App Review is for. Most of my rejections were for how I described a feature, not how a feature worked.

Also there are ways to defeat App Review. Geo-fencing, time-boxing, etc so your illegal code never runs during review.

[kuon]

This kind of things make me wonder why I am honest and poor (I mean not rich to the millions, I am not actually "poor"). I could do scams like this and be rich by the minute...

[morganvachon]

You said it yourself: You're honest. Take pride in that and keep being you.

I have just enough knowledge and just enough free time to maybe pull off one of these kinds of scams, but two things stop me: One, I have to look at myself in the mirror every day, and two, even if I set my morals aside, given my luck, I'd be the one Apple finally decides to make an example out of and sends the feds to my doorstep.

[pcunite]

Honestly can very much mean making less. The rich are not often associated with "giving" but rather "taking".

[akcreek]

How are chargebacks handled on the App store? I would assume a scam like this will receive a relatively enormous number of chargebacks.

[tinus_hn]

I don't understand why such an obvious scam works; Apple keeps the money for a while so they should be able to cancel the developer account and refund all users.

[endgame]

At what point do you say "no, the app store experiment has failed" and give users control of their own devices?

Never, I guess.

[amelius]

We need an extension of net neutrality (app neutrality?)

[chipperyman573]

Once Apple stops making money. At 30% for every transaction, this won't happen any time soon.

[meric]

Looks like many of the keywords you can buy Ads for are underpriced. To advertise for a keyword you need to build can "relevant" to that keyword. It takes time for legitimate app developers to build apps to take advantage of those keywords. Until then, the underpricing of ads is taken advantage of by these "scammers" who build costly non-functional apps and recycle the earnings into buying ads for them.

[Dylan16807]

That won't fix anything. When a scammer is successfully charging 50 times as much as a legitimate app, they can outbid any real ad.

[balladeer]

And I thought Apple vets the apps (and from what I heard even betas and upgrades/updates too?) before letting it go live on the App Store.

As a long time Android user (and no I wans't happy for most parts; and I wanted to taste the iOS waters both as an user and a mobile dev) who recently moved to an iPhone SE I feel really disappointed.

[ge96]

Haha I thought this was a how to guide initially as a "good entrepreneur" mind you good to me is subjective, or is it personal. Money is money right? I can't ask my clients to pay me so I obvs don't support that.

Nice into the rabbit hole though, should see how bad it gets with VMs.

[mark_edward]

Are you saying you're a scammer? I'm having a hard time understanding this comment

[fright]

While it's frustrating if taken at face value, Sensor Tower's numbers aren't totally valid. They get the number for a few of my apps really wrong. The download stats are more or less true, but the revenue can be way off.

[jitbit]

Yeah.

And Apple just rejected my app because it has a 'register free trial' link. Which is actually free, actually a trial, no CC info asked, no in-app purchase.

Their response was "if you offering something - you should be using in-app purchases".

Oh. OK.

[hellofunk]

When I read stuff like this I really lose faith in the human race.

[whyagaindavid]

Does nobody from apple read hn? How does one recommend iPhone to NGOs, privacy activists, other vulnerable people?