[valuearb]

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.

[TomSwirly]

> 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.

[valuearb]

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.

[thisarticle]

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)

[bredren]

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.

[Jenda_]

> 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.

[valuearb]

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.

[novok]

Why don't they just leave the badly implemented keyboard then and slap a subscription button on it?

[valuearb]

They probably A/B tested and had a far lower conversion rate when users saw their crappy keyboard.