A top-grossing scam on the App Store • Hacker News Board

Re: A top-grossing scam on the App Store

#61

Post by simonw » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

jjtheblunt wrote: post #9

The 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…

I would hope that the trust and safety team at Apple are sorting apps by revenue-generated-per-month and investigating the ones at the top of the list first.

Re: A top-grossing scam on the App Store

#62

Post by zepto » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

phreack wrote: post #5

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.

> 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 sounds like you are arguing that more medical scams would be better.

App review fails sometimes, but removing it would be worse.

Re: A top-grossing scam on the App Store

#63

Post by zepto » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

fsflover wrote: post #50

ehsankia wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> without any evidence Do GNU/Linux repositories count? F-Droid?

Obviously not. They simply aren’t a meaningful target for scams the way the iOS store is.

Re: A top-grossing scam on the App Store

#64

Post by JoshTko » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 6:19 PM UTC

hundchenkatze wrote: post #37

Bud wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been proven a rousing success, actually, and needs to stay, urgently. It's literally the most rousing success of any product in the history of civilization. You might want to re-calibrate your sensors a bit about what is successful.

Yes, it's been successful at creating the illusion that as long as I'm in Apple's garden all is well. Meanwhile extremely profitable scams (for both Apple and the scammer) remain in the store.

Average users view the garden as a feature, not a bug - and that's the point. Apple removing complexity that their user's do not understand or need is good product design. HN audience is not Apple's main target audience.

Re: A top-grossing scam on the App Store

#65

Post by terrywilcox » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 6:19 PM UTC

It's as if the people paying for this app aren't actually the ones complaining.

Why wouldn't they complain if it was a scam?

Because they're not actually using it. It's a money laundering app.

If you're just laundering money through an app, it doesn't have to actually do anything.

And if you make the price outrageously high, you can launder more money with fewer clicks and reduce the risk of some idiot actually buying it.

Re: A top-grossing scam on the App Store

#66

Post by hctaw » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 6:22 PM UTC

mason55 wrote: post #10

unicornfinder wrote: post #8

Earlier 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.

>It's only a problem when you abuse your monopoly position to restrict competitors.

Like what Spotify is suing them over, for example.

Re: A top-grossing scam on the App Store

#67

Post by brianwawok » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #60

I got scammed on the App Store a couple of weeks ago. I needed the SmartThings app for some Samsung home automation devices, searched for it, and installed this one: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/smart-things-smart-view-app/id... When it charged me a $20/year subscription (now cancelled) I thought "Wow, Samsung charging me for this feels pretty cheap of them, but I guess that's how they do things - after all, I found…

And I suspect you are in the top 1% of users. How is a 80 year old granny going to know which one to buy?

Re: A top-grossing scam on the App Store

#68

Post by Apocryphon » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 6:26 PM UTC

xondono wrote: post #48

Calvin02 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but if it came to Google, Facebook, or Amazon, you'd be all over them with a pitchfork. Users of HN really have some rose coloured blinders on when it comes to Apple.

If people judged Googles playstore with this criteria pitchforks wouldn’t cut it. This post to me sounds like someone claiming spam filters are worthless because an email got across. The relevant metric is how many scams aren’t there , not how many have managed to stay for some indeterminate amount of time.

It's perfectly possible to criticize both Apple and Google at the same time.

If anything, these examples just illustrate why centralized app stores are inherently flawed, even if Apple's store is of much greater quality than Google's.

Corporate cheerleading is boring and elides that the greater issue at hand is about openness and choice vs. closeness and security. Examples such as TFA illustrate that despite corporate promises, their security is incomplete.

Re: A top-grossing scam on the App Store

#69

Post by fsflover » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 6:26 PM UTC

zepto wrote: post #63

fsflover wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without any evidence Do GNU/Linux repositories count? F-Droid?

Obviously not. They simply aren’t a meaningful target for scams the way the iOS store is.

Yes, they are. Go look how many servers run GNU/Linux.

Re: A top-grossing scam on the App Store

#70

Post by valparaiso » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 6:27 PM UTC

simion314 wrote: post #27

mason55 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

It seems you skipped preliminary hearing in September 2020. Judge already asked why Epic thinks Apple walled garden (closed platform) is illegal while such types of businesses were legal for decades.

Also judge rejected comparison of open and closed platforms. So she asked Epic lawyers what's the difference between Apple's closed platform and Xbox/PlayStation and Nintendo.

Epic lawyers failed badly without answering. Also failed to answer question when did Apple become monopoly.