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by sgentle 174 days ago
Only time I've ever been successfully phished was the App Store. I have an Android phone but I wanted to try the ChatGPT app on my iPad and naively clicked the first result, which was of course a scummy clone. I have since wised up and understand the App Store search results to be roughly torrent search levels of trustworthy.

I guess the bar for user trust has now dropped enough across the board to sell more off without losing customers? Pretty sorry state of affairs.
6 comments
nottorp 174 days ago
> torrent search levels of trustworthy

Proper torrent search sites have a comments section that you should check before downloading anything :)

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mrweasel 174 days ago
Your experience illustrates precisely why the ads in the ad store should be worthless. I have never clicked on the ad in the app store. Regardless of how legitimate it looks, I will never click it. The vast majority for ads are clearly either scams or they are at least attempting to piggy back on the popularity of others, and I'll support neither of those cases.

I don't know what it is with Apple, maybe they aren't sufficiently exposed to scams, but they seem to not understand it's an issue, or their metrics are solely based on revenue. Because even if something is a borderline scam, Apple probably gets their 30%.

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type0 174 days ago
> Because even if something is a borderline scam, Apple probably gets their 30%.

Exactly this, the same reason why Facebook relies on scam ads for at least a third of their revenue.

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IlikeKitties 174 days ago
> I have since wised up and understand the App Store search results to be roughly torrent search levels of trustworthy.

join a private tracker friend :)

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BLKNSLVR 174 days ago
30% curation tax doing a wonderful job.
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FabHK 174 days ago
> App Store search results to be roughly torrent search levels of trustworthy

Well put. So it is a combination of a walled garden and a torrent search; just not sure whether it's the best of both worlds or the worst.

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skylurk 174 days ago
There are also a lot scummy Microsoft Authenticator clones with near identical icons being advertized ahead of the real one.

Be careful in the App Store!

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