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Apple’s tightly controlled App Store is teeming with scams

washingtonpost.com

151–160 of 261 posts

Re: Apple’s tightly controlled App Store is teeming with scams

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Apple loves to claim that they need full control over their platform to keep their platform safe.

Their PR lets them have it both ways.

Their users too, as shown in every other comment here.

Re: Apple’s tightly controlled App Store is teeming with scams

#152
post #2

The worst thing is, people have this belief that Apple is somehow protecting them, so they offload the critical thinking to Apple and lower their own guards. For example, a person thought he was getting a legitimate Bitcoin wallet app, but turns out it was a fake and he lost his life savings [1]. edit: to be clear, I'm not blaming Apple for not stopping these scams, at their scale, it's just practically impossible to…

This makes me wonder, can such thieves easily convert the stolen Bitcoin or are these blacklisted everywhere?

Re: Apple’s tightly controlled App Store is teeming with scams

#154
post #2

The worst thing is, people have this belief that Apple is somehow protecting them, so they offload the critical thinking to Apple and lower their own guards. For example, a person thought he was getting a legitimate Bitcoin wallet app, but turns out it was a fake and he lost his life savings [1]. edit: to be clear, I'm not blaming Apple for not stopping these scams, at their scale, it's just practically impossible to…

> I'm not blaming Apple for not stopping these scams Why not? You should blame them. They have positioned themselves as the gatekeepers. Why? To extract profit from application developers. However, such a powerful position also comes with expectations and responsibilities. They should absolutely not be allowed to get away with gross negligence. We absolutely must blame them every single time they fail to keep malicio…

I agree, I think they should help him, but I also think it would open a whole can of worms.

The fact is, no matter how much time/energy/effort they spend, they will never eliminate all scams, scams would just become more and more sophisticated. This doesn't mean, they should just give up, but having been through the review process, they are already doing quite a bit.

So that would mean, they will make it much harder for apps to get approved in the store (and it's already a very painful process), so you'd only end up with apps from large developers which is not ideal.

We are seeing a similar dynamic with Youtube which has become rather "ban-happy" as in they don't want to take risks, so would rather ban content than try to reduce false positives, because at a certain scale, you just can't identify content with good precision/recall.

Re: Apple’s tightly controlled App Store is teeming with scams

#155
post #115
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple didn't promise to make sure the app store was completely secure. A promise which they realistically can't keep at their scale no matter how hard they try. They don’t. This is made up.

They did. This was literally their defense in Epic lawsuit. Summarized Apple lawyers said: "We can't offer alternative stores because they would be full of scams which would be bad for users. Our store is curated and safe for users.".

Yeah. The man who lost his life savings due to malicious iOS software bearing Apple's signature of approval should directly cite this as evidence that Apple is responsible for his losses. Apple should pay back every last penny, his lawyers and more for good measure.

Re: Apple’s tightly controlled App Store is teeming with scams

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not blaming Apple for not stopping these scams Why not? You should blame them. They have positioned themselves as the gatekeepers. Why? To extract profit from application developers. However, such a powerful position also comes with expectations and responsibilities. They should absolutely not be allowed to get away with gross negligence. We absolutely must blame them every single time they fail to keep malicio…

I agree, I think they should help him, but I also think it would open a whole can of worms. The fact is, no matter how much time/energy/effort they spend, they will never eliminate all scams, scams would just become more and more sophisticated. This doesn't mean, they should just give up, but having been through the review process, they are already doing quite a bit. So that would mean, they will make it much harder…

> I also think it would open a whole can of worms

Absolutely. Apple should be afraid of holding the gatekeeper position. Anyone should.

When people can install and use whatever they want, safety becomes their responsibility. They should open up their platform and let people do their own due dilligence. If they assume that responsibility and then neglect it, they absolutely can and should be blamed for any problems.

Re: Apple’s tightly controlled App Store is teeming with scams

#158
post #24

The article's premise does not make sense. This stuff happens despite the tight control, not because of it. If it was uncurated, it would be a cesspool like the Google play store (or ...shudder... the "competing" stores). Having a paid app that reads QR codes is not necessarily a scam. The article admits that 2/3 of the apps they reported were taken down. The article claims: "If consumers were to have access to alter…

> Play store apps, unless proven otherwise, are generally malware you carry with yourself every day, with potential access to everything in your device because the OS is nowhere near locked down compared to Apple counterpart.

Do you have a single fact to back this up, or did you just read it from Apple's marketing?

Re: Apple’s tightly controlled App Store is teeming with scams

#159
If you've spent anywhere near 10 minutes on the app store, you can tell that outside of top charting apps, app store is filled with shit just as playstore is. From overall nonfunctional quickly made pos to blatant copyright infringement evil shit. Fine, I get it it's hard to curate, but let's not pretend then it actually is curated overall. So, Apple, either do what Nintendo did when they started with NES and come hard on QA or stop pretending.

Re: Apple’s tightly controlled App Store is teeming with scams

#160

Some relevant Apple marketing statements [1]: "The apps you love. From a place you can trust." "For over a decade, the App Store has proved to be a safe and trusted place to discover and download apps." "Every day, moderators review worldwide App Store charts for quality and accuracy.” "Dedicated to trust and safety.” "Apps must adhere to our guidelines.” "From more videos to rankings and reviews, there are loads of…

So does that mean that you can sue Apple if an app fails at any of these? Of course not, because lying for Apple is common business practice nowadays.

"no reasonable person would possibly believe these statements as true."

That statement from the courts has allowed all sorts of lying in marketing.

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