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.
Which is actually better, because I and an average Joe D. User at least _expect_ shady apps to be abundant there, despite all Google's efforts to prove otherwise. We exercise care there because we know for a fact Google's approval system is half-automated and full of holes.
On the other hand, the rhetoric Apple's marketing employs all the time suggests the App Store is the Internet Safety Panacea, a risk-free Teletubbyland for everyone. Which is far worse because it entices you to assume it's totally safe and let your guard down.
Clearly false based on the observed incidence of malware, botnets, and fraud on Android. People in fact are not able to avoid these things.
You are not comparable to “Joe D user” if you know how to protect yourself against these things. He does not.
It actually is safe for most people to let their guard down with Apple’s store. A few counter examples show that it’s a moving target to keep it safe, but nothing more.
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...
This sounds almost like the developers should be permanent, pardon my French, bitches to both Apple who can boot them for any petty reason, and to scammers who copycat them and make money with straightaway fraud, then to Apple again, who won't do anything about the scammers (I wonder what percentage of App Store revenue comes from those, once you look past the biggest players like Microsoft/Adobe/whoever else is in the top 20), and then to Apple again, who will incorporate your app's functionality into the core of their OS offering and then boast how they were the first to come up with the idea.
And not only should be the developers bitches, they should, according to you, accept and enjoy this dubious "honor".
You can build an app that only serves an extremely narrow market niche to improve functionality that is incredibly important to the platform owner, but then you shouldn’t complain about being sherlocked or how tough competition is.