[Buge]

Click fraud on desktop is obviously much easier than on mobile.

Even on mobile, ideally (for the fraudster) it would be done in an emulator. There are probably tricks that can be done to detect emulators though. I would consider those flaws in the emulator that should be fixed.

[brownbat]

Click farms are often a room full of phones on racks with cheap labor:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-11/look-inside-chines...

I don't think they're primarily doing "click fraud" for ads so much as account creation (for spam), captcha defeats, and social media manipulation.

Maybe that's all click (tap?) fraud though.

Also... I'm not sure how Tapster compares to click farms on pricing. Aces them on legitimacy though. So... I don't think a Fortune 500 company is going to send their in development app over to Russian mobs for final bug testing. So they might be same thing but very very different market segments.

[Buge]

I think the cat and mouse game of finding an emulator aberration vs fixing the emulator aberration is waited toward the finding side. Especially for complex systems like current mobile devices, and when they are often heavily locked down like iOS.

At some point the effort to develop a good enough emulator is more expensive than just buying the physical devices.

But another option beyond emulator vs physical devices is physical devices with physical tapping (Tapster) vs physical devices with emulated tapping. That last option seems to be what is used in your video. It might be too expensive to build an emulator, but it is cheaper to (jailbreak? and) emulate touch inputs than to pay a person or a robot to put in real touch inputs.

[brownbat]

Ha, and now it hits me that I used the video without any actual humans... Maybe the cheap humans are falling by the wayside.