[newscracker]

A scammy subscription of $400+ a year?! And this gets to the top of the charts because Apple makes more money from it!

These are the instances where the 30% commission (or even the recently announced 15% commission for those earning less than $1M in revenue a year) seems like extortion. Apple really needs to step up on app reviews in terms of false positives (banning legitimate apps for frivolous reasons and reinstating them after social media uproar) and false negatives (allowing scam apps and clones to thrive while hurting the original apps).

Hopefully the threats of regulation can’t manifest soon enough for this to get better for the developers and the users. On one side of the equation you have the developers and users for whom the App Store ecosystem is getting toxic. On the other side of the equation you have two parties making a lot of money for low effort — the crooks and Apple. This is not a good look, Tim Apple and Apple.

(I don’t even want to get into how much worse the Play Store is since it’s a digression from the topic)

[ceejayoz]

One thing I'd like to see instituted is more extensive review for apps with purchases/subscriptions over a certain value. "If you wanna charge more than $100/year, we're gonna vet it more carefully".

[newscracker]

That makes sense. But there would have to be much lower limits even on a weekly and monthly basis. How much lower is a bit subjective (even what seems like a small amount to one person may be a big amount for another). From reviews I’ve seen for some apps, it seems like users don’t even know how to approach Apple for refunds when the app is scammy or doesn’t work as promised. This latter part should also be made easier. All this will require additional staff, which Apple can surely afford without having a big dent in its margins.

[dawnerd]

I wonder how much of the app store is purely automated at this point. Any human reviewing this should have spotted that it's a scam very quickly.