It tests every app, including this one. Think about what really happened here.
Edit: Apparently my downvoters can’t think about what really happened here so I’ll explain it.
In App Review this app worked fine. Oh, the keyboard was likely lame and not useful, but the scam screens were no where to be seen. Then the app is approved and placed on the store. Now the scam screens appear.
It’s trivial to do, is done all the time even by legitimate developers, and incredibly hard for Apple review to detect.
> Then the app is approved and placed on the store. Now the scam screens appear.
This means there's some switch built into the code that changes its behavior, either after a certain date, or on certain known IPs that Apple tests on, or after a certain URL changes value.
At this point, the complaints pour in. People ask for refunds and claim it's not as advertised. The $400 subscription fee has to be mentioned in some complaint.
And at this point, Apple falls flat on its face. It does not investigate any of these serious complaints, which are easily validated.
Apple is one of the most profitable companies in the world. If they can't afford to do the right thing, they shouldn't run this fake "walled garden" app store. If 30% of my app dollar goes to them, an app that doesn't try to steal hundreds of dollars from me is a very very reasonable expectation.
Apple gets thousands of complaints a day. They have to do a detailed investigation or they’ll risk pulling legitimate apps. The apps can also be geofenced so the behavior doesn’t occur in Cupertino.
Just because Apple doesn’t immediately remove a scam doesn’t mean they aren’t working to remove it.
So hire more people to get through the backlog faster. These are problems money can solve and Apple has plenty. (Disclaimer: I’m an Apple fanboy, use their products almost exclusively, but I still think it’s ridiculous all the shit apps that get through)
I wonder if it is trivially hard to detect or not.
For example, if the app reviewer’s touch interaction with an app were recorded and the resulting screens diffed with the same pattern after publishing, there should be no changes.
This is a method used as part of some UI testing with selenium.
There could be apps this does not work for, such as when content changes or conversion type UI is shown.
But I imagine there is some amount of low hanging fruit here. And even that once a “scam” app like this one is reported, Apple should want to review past diffs to look for the example of the violation.
I also agree that for the price, this is what apple should be preventing on behalf honest developers
It is also worth noting that DMCA is embraced ITT whereas with Github’s response to DMCA recently it did not get the same treatment.
> For example, if the app reviewer’s touch interaction with an app were recorded and the resulting screens diffed with the same pattern after publishing, there should be no changes.
There are lots of valid reasons for apps to change based on outside events (location, time, online content). For example apps displaying weather forecast or current news.
I think there is a solution and Apple should implement it. But even code we know how to write doesn’t appear overnight, doesn’t work perfectly, and doesn’t suffer from high levels of false positives.
It's just bike-shedding. Enforcing names or the fact that you mention subscribing to the app on a website is easy whereas testing every app that comes in is hard.
Apple advertises the benefit of its App Store that thanks to the diligent manual review, such fraud simply has no place there. They also maintain that the fees are high because the review process is top notch and thus expensive.
Now they have to admit that either the walls in their garden are worse than Swiss cheese by letting bad actors in, or that they are complicit in that fraud, because someone had to approve that shit.
Now if I’m just as likely to be screwed over by an Apple-approved app from their walled garden as I am by sideloading random crap, what’s the point in it for me, as a user? If I have to exercise just as much caution, I can just as well sideload what I want.
> Now if I’m just as likely to be screwed over by an Apple-approved app from their walled garden as I am by sideloading random crap, what’s the point in it for me, as a user? If I have to exercise just as much caution, I can just as well sideload what I want.
If this were true, then sure.
But it obviously isn’t.
Even the Google Play store is way worse in terms of risks than the App Store.
Well, they can always take their business elsewhere, where the grass is greener. But they came to the App Store because it's a dozens of billions of dollars a year market...
At least I don't need to pay 99 USD a year for some "review" that clearly only works in favor of Apple (they mostly seems to approve anything from smaller developers like shown in this post, while using draconian and arbitrary rules for competitor apps like Spotify).
Periodically testing apps to see they haven't become a scam.
Apple takes 30% - one dollar in three goes to them, and the remaining 2 has to go to writing and testing software, design, customer support, advertising.
It's ridiculous that so many people think Apple can just take this huge cut and then allow people to be literally robbed by scam apps and just shrug.
It’s ridiculous that you don’t think a good portion if that 30% doesn’t go to writing and testing software, design, customer support, advertising, not to forget hosting, developer services, localization, etc.
Apple should figure out a better automated solution for this specific problem, but it’s ignorant to not acknowledge they already do far more than other app stores.
> It’s ridiculous that you don’t think a good portion if that 30% doesn’t go to writing and testing software, design, customer support, advertising, not to forget hosting, developer services, localization, etc.
Google manages all of that with a measly one time $25 developer fee. Clearly $99 of recurring developer charges is the bigger scam here.
But some won't. And if people get used to it, they will go elsewhere for a specific app and leave the scams behind.
People be forced will go to really shitty stores that are way worse than Apple’s one for specific apps, and the overall app market will become much less safe.
Why? Because people establishing new stores will just pay for exclusives.
It’s extremely difficult for Apple to stop apps from behaving differently during review than they do when downloaded from the App Store. A large number of developers implement schemes like this, and most aren’t scammers.
Even if Apple has reviewers download the approved app from the store to double check it hadn’t changed behavior, they can be gamed. Remember the Uber App Review geofencing that went on for years?
Apple users will defend its behavior to the bitter. No matter what you post about Apple, it will either be excused or praised.
Does anybody know of a firefox addon or monkeyscript to filter articles on Hackernews? At this point I just want to hide any article with "M1" or "Apple" in it.
There's a guy who made a script that downvotes any comment that starts with "I mean" or ends with "so..." I wonder if he's worked something up like this.