App Store scam apps make up almost 2% of top-grossing apps – 9to5Mac

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Checks run by the Washington Post revealed that App Store scam apps make up almost 2% of the top-grossing apps, regardless of CEO Tim Cook’s insistence that the app evaluate course of is efficient at rejecting them.

The paper estimates that the scam apps have price iPhone homeowners a complete of $48 million …

Background

The app evaluate course of, designed to make sure that scam and malicious apps don’t make it into the App Store, has been one of Apple’s key defenses in preventing antitrust lawsuits and investigations into its monopoly maintain over the distribution of iOS apps.

Tim Cook argued last year that the App Store is a “safe and trusted place.”

We created the App Store in 2008 as a function of the iPhone. Launching with a bit of greater than 500 apps, it was our bold try and dramatically broaden the options and customizability of each person’s system.

We needed to create a secure and trusted place for customers to find apps–and a way of offering a safe and supportive method for builders to develop, take a look at and distribute apps to iPhone customers globally.

Curation has at all times been one of the App Store’s chief options and sources of worth for our customers. We held a high quality division retailer as a mannequin: place the place clients can discover an ideal selection of choices, however can really feel assured that the choice is excessive-high quality, dependable and present.

However, there have been a flurry of reviews suggesting that this isn’t the case – that scam apps not solely get accepted into the shop, however they continue to be there even once they have a excessive sufficient profile to earn millions of dollars.

Scale of App Store scam apps

A paywalled report within the Washington Post helps the competition that thousands and thousands of {dollars} are being made.

Apple’s tightly managed App Store is teeming with scams. Nearly 2 p.c of Apple’s top-grossing apps on in the future have been scams — and so they have price individuals $48 million.

Apple chief govt Tim Cook has lengthy argued it wants to regulate app distribution on iPhones, in any other case the App Store would flip into “a flea market.”

But among the many 1.eight million apps on the App Store, scams are hiding in plain sight. Customers for a number of VPN apps, which allegedly shield customers’ information, complained in Apple App Store critiques that the apps instructed customers their units have been contaminated by a virus to dupe them into downloading and paying for software program they don’t want. A QR code reader app that continues to be on the shop tips clients into paying $4.99 every week for a service that’s now included within the digicam app of the iPhone. Some apps fraudulently current themselves as being from main manufacturers akin to Amazon and Samsung.

FlickType developer Kosta Eleftheriou has made a reputation for himself in figuring out such scams, together with the ease with which builders can buy fake reviews and ratings to assist make their scam apps look professional.

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