[Ethan_Mick]

This really bothers me. I've been fine with Apple's "Walled Garden" App Store approach, because I do believe it offers consumers an amount of safety when buying apps.

Anecdotally, I tell friends and family who are new to their iPhone (or Mac, iPad), that they don't need anti-virus, certainly not on their iPhone. They don't need to worry about downloading bad apps from the App Store, Apple doesn't let anything bad in (Android has a history of malware in its app store). It's what they expect from owning an Apple device.

I really don't want to have to start telling them, "Careful, you could be downloading a fake app" anytime soon. I believe Apple should work harder to stop apps like these from getting into the store - it's much better for developers and consumers.

[oneweekwonder]

According to 148apps.biz[1] Apple gets just under 1000 apps submitted per day.

At that scale they can not "guarantee" safety. The same goes for any other application store, that works at the scale.

Some of the checking the submitter did could easily be automated and flag a user if there is a possibility.

But they "must" be using some tech like that, I hope?

[1]: http://148apps.biz/app-store-metrics/?mpage=submission

[BHSPitMonkey]

With the magnitude of profits Apple makes from the App Store, they can't hire 100 smart people to intelligently and thoughtfully screen 10 submissions per day? Also, it sounds like their automated tests don't (for instance) check the submitted binary against hashes of all the other binaries that have ever been submitted, which I think would be a good step toward mitigating this particular plagiarism issue.