Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple’s tightly controlled App Store is teeming with scams

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 261 posts

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

#161

Post by jpalomaki »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #149
rawtxapp wrote: 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…

The real solution I see would be to charge money for listing apps in the store. And not small money, but significant, non-refundable fees. Enough to actually check and verify the software by competent humans and also just to make scams more expensive (you would need to pay $5-10k upfront, like Google requires for certain Gmail apps).

But I don’t like that kind of approach, so therefore I would be careful in demanding Apple to fix the problem. Any fix they come up with, would likely cause troubles for small players.

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

#162

Post by swiley »

brianberns wrote: post #140
dkarras wrote: 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…

18 out of 1000 = “teeming with scams”? It’s a real problem, but the headline is sensationalized.

When you're promised no scams and 1.8% of apps are scams (which is way higher if you search for niche things, especially stuff that isn't allowed) then yes that's "teeming with scams."

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

#163

Post by matheusmoreira »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #95
rawtxapp wrote: 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…

> 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]. There's a lot more wrong in this scenario than just the app store. If someone is going to be so amazingly careless with half a million dollars...

The man's recklessness was caused by a false sense of security created by Apple themselves.

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

#164

Post by swiley »

personjerry wrote: post #147

So there's this "Wrong Button!"[0] in the app store that just plays a "Wrong" sound clip when you click it. And also it has 5 different ads on the screen, an unskippable ad on opening the app that forces open Safari to view another ad, and a "Share" function presumably so they can bombard your friends with ads too. Now I thought this was crappy, and I wanted the "Wrong" sound clip as said by Trump, so last week for f…

That sounds like it really should be a web page.

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

#165

Post by craftinator »

paulpauper wrote: post #136
richardwhiuk wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real issue is Bitcoin here.

Bitcoin makes scamming so much more lucrative . So many pple have been scammed such as fake apps and giveaway scams.

s/Bitcoin/Apple

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

#166

Post by matheusmoreira »

jpalomaki wrote: post #161
matheusmoreira wrote: post #149

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…

The real solution I see would be to charge money for listing apps in the store. And not small money, but significant, non-refundable fees. Enough to actually check and verify the software by competent humans and also just to make scams more expensive (you would need to pay $5-10k upfront, like Google requires for certain Gmail apps). But I don’t like that kind of approach, so therefore I would be careful in demanding…

The real solution is to stop being a gatekeeper. Just let people install and use whatever they want.

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

#167

Post by lukifer »

extra88 wrote: post #119
smoldesu wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When has Apple made that promise? Where do they make that promise? From apple.com/privacy: "Every one of the more than 1.8 million apps on the App Store is required to follow strict privacy guidelines and report how it uses your data. And every app is rigorously reviewed by a team of experts at Apple."

Privacy and security are not the same thing. Also, an app can follow all the privacy and security guidelines and still use dark patterns to mislead and get something from you that you wouldn’t otherwise give up or outright defraud you. I’m sure Apple makes a good faith attempt at preventing that as well but they can’t catch everything.

The words "strict" and "rigorous" do a lot of heavy lifting in setting user (and market) expectations. We programmers are pre-inclined to think in terms of Boolean logic, but the law frequently splits hairs on qualitative value judgments; there is no simple rubric for what counts as "reckless endangerment" or "gross negligence", for instance.

I think it's a given that no one expects any QA or security process to perform perfectly. But there's some fuzzy line past which Apple's process fails to be "rigorous", and whatever that line is (or should be), courts will inevitably contrast the high expectations set by Apple's marketing with these real-world results when considering claims of negligence, liability, false advertising, anti-competitive behavior, etc.

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

#168

Post by personjerry »

swiley wrote: post #164
personjerry wrote: post #147

So there's this "Wrong Button!"[0] in the app store that just plays a "Wrong" sound clip when you click it. And also it has 5 different ads on the screen, an unskippable ad on opening the app that forces open Safari to view another ad, and a "Share" function presumably so they can bombard your friends with ads too. Now I thought this was crappy, and I wanted the "Wrong" sound clip as said by Trump, so last week for f…

That sounds like it really should be a web page.

I see what you're getting at. For me, this was a small toy, and websites have maintenance costs while this has none, and that's the tradeoff I prefer at the moment.

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

#169

Post by nwienert »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #157
rawtxapp wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes and likewise, car manufacturers should remove seatbelts and airbags. They simply encourage reckless driving, and by giving the false sense of security / assuming the gatekeeper role, they should be liable for any accident.

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

#170

Post by heavyset_go »

nwienert wrote: post #169
matheusmoreira wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes and likewise, car manufacturers should remove seatbelts and airbags. They simply encourage reckless driving, and by giving the false sense of security / assuming the gatekeeper role, they should be liable for any accident.

Weird, I can flash whatever code I want to on my car's ECU. There's even an entire subculture dedicated to modding ECU firmware.
Post reply on HN