So it's not just a scam, it's a scam pretending to be a medical app? The walled garden method has been proven a failure and needs to go urgently.
It's never been about quality. It's about control.
how did Nintendo save the video game market?
A top-grossing scam on the App Store
21–30 of 285 posts
Re: A top-grossing scam on the App Store
#22The assertion in that title is patently false click-bait. Apple definitely cares about its customers being driven away from them. That doesn't mean they've caught all scams, or more importantly in this case have managed to automate detection of them all, definitely not as fast as folks online identify them. Also note that there are entire classes of scams that never get click baity titles because Apple DOES detect th…
You seem certain that given a political foundation of “service capitalism” another player will be “better”.
I’m not buying apps from wannabes who can vanish or buying into an app market that could go tits up the next week.
The market as a whole is basically Google; here today, gone tomorrow.
Re: A top-grossing scam on the App Store
#23The assertion in that title is patently false click-bait. Apple definitely cares about its customers being driven away from them. That doesn't mean they've caught all scams, or more importantly in this case have managed to automate detection of them all, definitely not as fast as folks online identify them. Also note that there are entire classes of scams that never get click baity titles because Apple DOES detect th…
This is a fair position to have, but maybe a follow-up question:
If you're able to share your thoughts without giving away private info from your time there: Based on this particular scam - with so many bad reviews AND the extremely high revenue being generated, should this not have tripped some kind of alarm for closer review?
How has this been going on for so long without anyone at Apple noticing? It's not like it's lost in a sea of minor apps generating middling income, it's literally in the top tenth-of-a-percent by gross revenue.
And I would bet a LOT of money that there are plenty of people at Apple who are well paid to closely watch their top performing apps. So how does this get missed, unless "is this a scam?" just isn't high on the list of priorities for those teams.
I think it's absolutely fair to question Apple's commitment to catching this stuff based on that.
Perhaps they are great at catching all the low-hanging fruit and the obvious stuff, but what if something gets through that first net? Is anyone paying attention then? Or are they just watching the money roll in?
Re: A top-grossing scam on the App Store
#24Apple and Google are poor stewards of the mobile app distribution market. It's time that their 13+ year stranglehold on app distribution is disrupted.
You know, I was thinking last night about the parallels between this and the anti-trust investigation into Microsoft back in the 90s. Back then Microsoft was in a heap of trouble over the fact that they bundled IE and didn't allow vendors to bundle other alternative browsers. Users could still install other browsers, but the fact that the OS came bundled with IE was seen as an abuse of Microsoft's market position. Ye…
To be honest, I always thought the IE issue was stupid, and surely from a modern perspective it even more bonkers. Google has an OS that is literally a browser engine, they're not the only one, and web technologies are commonly built into OSes nowadays at a low level.
The other anti-trust claims against MS were I think largely credible and reasonable, but that one really has not aged well.
Re: A top-grossing scam on the App Store
#25So it's not just a scam, it's a scam pretending to be a medical app? The walled garden method has been proven a failure and needs to go urgently.
I'm not defending Apple, and I dislike the walled garden model too, but you can't just blindly claim that this is a failure and a non-walled method would do a better job without any evidence.
Re: A top-grossing scam on the App Store
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know, I was thinking last night about the parallels between this and the anti-trust investigation into Microsoft back in the 90s. Back then Microsoft was in a heap of trouble over the fact that they bundled IE and didn't allow vendors to bundle other alternative browsers. Users could still install other browsers, but the fact that the OS came bundled with IE was seen as an abuse of Microsoft's market position. Ye…
To be honest, I always thought the IE issue was stupid, and surely from a modern perspective it even more bonkers. Google has an OS that is literally a browser engine, they're not the only one, and web technologies are commonly built into OSes nowadays at a low level. The other anti-trust claims against MS were I think largely credible and reasonable, but that one really has not aged well.
> Google has an OS that is literally a browser engine
It's not though. Chrome OS is literally Linux. You can install Firefox.
Re: A top-grossing scam on the App Store
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know, I was thinking last night about the parallels between this and the anti-trust investigation into Microsoft back in the 90s. Back then Microsoft was in a heap of trouble over the fact that they bundled IE and didn't allow vendors to bundle other alternative browsers. Users could still install other browsers, but the fact that the OS came bundled with IE was seen as an abuse of Microsoft's market position. Ye…
You said it yourself: > an abuse of Microsoft's market position Apple has no such market position to abuse. It's perfectly legal to put restrictions on your product. It's perfectly legal to be a monopoly. It's only a problem when you abuse your monopoly position to restrict competitors.
>Apple has no such market position to abuse.
It depends how you want to measure things, in US iOS has more then 50% mobile market share but Apple fanboys will use only this numbers (or how many more purchases are on Apple sore) in the conversations about how cool Apple is, when we talk about the monopoly/duopoly then world wide numbers are used, maybe throw more type of devices in there...
I would say that Apple is clearly anti-competitive, not allowing other browsers, giving their own apps access to private APIs, their own apps ignoring the users firewall and security rules etc, but judges will have to decide on this and if they still consider is legal we might need to update some laws .
IMO the society is more important then a company, so if we decide that we no longer want this bullshit we will advocate and hopefully have the issue corrected.
The Apple situation looks to me similar to when mobile providers would lock phones to their network, then charge you to unlock them, this was made illegal , if you own your phone then the unlock should be possible for free, exception is if you are still renting/paying for the device so you are not owning it fully.
Re: A top-grossing scam on the App Store
#28I'm just going to say one simple thing: very few people are qualified to assess what Apple actually "seems to care" about. And this poster definitely isn't one of those people.
As for the invented-from-whole-cloth link title: please don't do that.
Re: A top-grossing scam on the App Store
#29The assertion in that title is patently false click-bait. Apple definitely cares about its customers being driven away from them. That doesn't mean they've caught all scams, or more importantly in this case have managed to automate detection of them all, definitely not as fast as folks online identify them. Also note that there are entire classes of scams that never get click baity titles because Apple DOES detect th…
>Apple definitely cares about its customers being driven away from them.
Maybe Apple realizes not caring about blatant scams won't drive customers away from them because there'll always be a core of people who buy into Apple's marketing and jump in to defend them basically no matter what's going on?
Re: A top-grossing scam on the App Store
#30The assertion in that title is patently false click-bait. Apple definitely cares about its customers being driven away from them. That doesn't mean they've caught all scams, or more importantly in this case have managed to automate detection of them all, definitely not as fast as folks online identify them. Also note that there are entire classes of scams that never get click baity titles because Apple DOES detect th…
> Also note that there are entire classes of scams that never get click baity titles because Apple DOES detect them and shut them down before they're widespread.
That's beside the point. According to the thread, Apple detected this one. So why didn't they shut it down? The thread speculates that it's because Apple is making significant revenue from it and, frankly, that sounds like a logical conclusion - at least until Apple can be bothered to remove the app or explain their justification for leaving it up.
Besides, doesn't Apple manually review apps on their store? I've read story after story of app devs complaining about how that review process screwed them over in one way or another. Surely one of the top 500 highest grossing apps on their store would garner at least a little extra attention in a manual review, right? How did this even slip through the cracks in the first place?