A top-grossing scam on the App Store

Here's an excerpt:

> Kara Swisher: Like Netflix and others, right. What’s wrong with Epic or any developer going their own way or allowing a direct payment system, instead of having to go through the App Store? Why should you have the control?

> Tim Cook: Well, I think somebody has to. I think somebody has to curate, right? Because users aren’t going to come there and buy things if they don’t have trust and confidence in the store. And we think our users want that.

> Kara Swisher: Why can’t there be more stores, other stores run by others?

> Tim Cook: Because if you had side loading, you would break the privacy and security model.

> Kara Swisher: On the phone itself, and the phone itself wouldn’t protect the user necessarily.

> Tim Cook: Well, you’d be opening up a huge vector on another store.

> [a minute or so later]

> Tim Cook: I think curation is important as a part of the App Store. In any given week, 100,000 applications come into the app review. 40,000 of them are rejected. Most of them are rejected because they don’t work or don’t work like they say that they work. You can imagine if curation went away, what would occur to the App Store in a very short amount of time.

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I agree that not having sideloading, without giving it any thought on the technical implentation, is probably safer in terms of reducing "viruses" and what not.

It's arguable that cases like families whose kids spends tens of thousands due to dark patterns in approved applications were no safer than if they had run a side loaded application or a vetted one though.

Similarly, I can only imagine the amount of money wasted on misleadingly titled applications.

You could perhaps argue that the privacy model is compromised anyway in the sense that you can install Facebook, sign up and have your info dumped online, through no fault of Apple. The upcoming ATT changes should help but they haven't existed since, well, the app store was created :)

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/opinion/apples-ceo-is-mak...

1. Do nothing more. It doesn’t seem to be going too badly for Apple

2. Have stricter review and allow sideloading. Obviously this is popular on HN but it seems to me that Apple would not do this and it doesn’t obviously help. Maybe users would just be trained to sideload (I vaguely recall that there was a time when many apps in mainland China were not in the App Store and had to be sideloaded. There would be well-written instructions for how to install them)

3. Be stricter at review. Maybe this is expensive (so Apple would have to increase fees or reduce profits). It might also not be good for Apple if fewer amateurs can release apps. But maybe that isn’t so significant and Apple make most of their money from bigger players.

4. Make it harder to profit from these scams. Maybe hold user payments in escrow for a while and look for evidence of scams—users quickly cancelling, leaving 1-star reviews, etc—and only pay later. To some extent this is “more scrutiny” so maybe this is just a way to make it targeted. Maybe this would still have the problem of hurting small players, and maybe most money lost to scams goes to small apps rather than “popular” ones like the one in the thread, so this flagging wouldn’t catch them.

5. Have a two-tier App Store with a section of “high quality” apps and a section of less-reviewed apps. Apple already does this to some extent with “editors” of the store, various articles about apps, and plenty of custom artwork too. I don’t know how they would pay for this thing or explain it to users but it seems it would still allow small players a chance while giving users better safety.

Personally I think I would like a mix of a few of these. I like the idea of a higher tier in the store and I would be ok if it was expensive to get into (e.g. dev has to pay $1000 for the first review of an app) and had various stricter requirements (e.g. a different contract with apple requiring more notification when transferring app ownership or longer settlement times for user purchases, but also things like the app having good performance). I would also like it if Apple would try to find popular apps in the lower tier and help the good ones into the higher tier (maybe for free for a good viral game or with deferred payments out of (in-) app purchase income for paid apps) while removing the bad ones. And I think they could still improve their scam detection in the lower tier.

The problem here is Apple cannot assume sole responsibility for policing and take a 30% cut, not allow anyone else to do a try and do better job and claim user safety is why they do all this and then even fail in any % of cases. people only care how many crimes are happening now, saying the policing has prevented so many other crimes is little help to all the people being cheated now.

Users were defrauded of $5/M +, Apple made 1.5M from this app. How has apple corrected this ? . A app claiming to show your pulse is not just financial scam, it is medical risk. Lives are at risk here. If Apple earning $1.5M from a fraud is unable protect its users from this kind of app, or come out and say what went wrong and how they are improving the system and actually doing it.

Why should I as user believe them ? Why should I not reasonably assume actions and financial structure for the Apple App store will do some basic checks inconsistently and get away with it if they can ?