The App Store Spam Problem | Hacker News Reader

The App Store Spam Problem

marco.org

96 pointsssclafani51 comments

I know this is obvious, but it seems like if Apple doesn't want crappy apps that don't take full advantage of all of the iPhone OS apis in the App Store there are a couple of simple steps they could take before resorting to something like the 3.3.1 change.

They do want crappy apps. There is no other way they could talk about how many apps they have in the store if they didn't.

Eg make an easy way to get a refund, like on the Android market.

Apple's app store doesn't have refunding?

How easy is it to return most software once you've used it? All retail shrinkwrap software, console or not, tends to be no returns once you actually open/use it. Typically the only ones that allow you to return software are indies with %110 guarantees and such not as marketing tools.

The App Store has refunds, but it isn't an automated process. You basically fill out a form in iTunes saying you want a refund (and say why), and you'll get one.

I've seen a few refunds. But, not too many; I could probably count the number of refunds given with only two hands.

That's true, but I don't think their goal was to weed out crappy apps. I think what they really wanted was to keep the platform exclusively their control, to remove the possibility of a 3rd-party SDK getting popular, lagging behind Apple's SDK and slowing down or interfering with the platform's progress.

The 3.3.1 change will keep lazy developers from making crappy Flash ports, but it won't automatically make lazy developers care about quality.

Apple is in a tough spot here, they get complaints about app quality and complaints about rejecting apps, they alienate people no matter what they do. I hope they find a way to regulate quality better without pissing off many more people, but that might not even be possible.

Apple’s reviewers are in a difficult position: any large-scale developer bans in the App Store are likely to attract negative press, so they’re probably reluctant to do any.

I don't get the impression that Apple is terribly concerned about negative press, at least not with respect to App Store policies.

Not to mention this would probably be received well by the general public - "Apple moves to curb scams and spams in App Store" and the such. They've already shown they don't much care for developer good will :)

Doing that would be acknowledging that there's a problem - and this is something that will never be done.

Remember, their devices are magical and Apple can never do anything wrong.

As if Apple had never admitted a problem in the App Store or Review process?

I seem to recall a number of letters and interviews in which they did exactly that and quite a few policy, code and process changes at Apple to directly address issues such as review turn-around time, policy reversals, per-version ratings, only allowing reviews from actual purchasers, etc.

How do they manage to block so many quality apps for whatever trivial terms violations but then not have provisions to block these clearly infringing and straight up scam apps?

These apps clearly not infringing Apple's trademarks and copyrights, so they are ok.</sarcasm>

I'm bemused to see developer opinion lining up so strongly behind the idea that Apple should apply their review judgment to block apps and/or ban developers from the store for supposed transgressions that violate no written policy or term of service.

It seems not so long ago popular opinion had Apple in the wrong for doing exactly that.

It's the perceived hypocrisy.

Apple either cares about app quality (their stated reason for barring Flash) or they don't (thus it would be fine to let the crapps stay) - but they want to have it both ways. That's what people are down on.

The idea is that if you're going to do it at all, you should do it competently. The biggest component of the early uproar over the approval process was that it was a total cockup.

As for "written policy or term of service", those only apply to you, not Apple, and are enforced at their leisure under their interpretation. They can do whatever they want -- they don't have to publish your work if they don't want to.

Currently Apple only polices trademarks and copyrights that they own themselves -- for everything else they willfully turn a blind eye and wait for an infringement notice from the IP owner. They probably think they can successfully argue to a court that this absolves them of responsibility in all cases under the DMCA, but I'm not so sure.

The spam apps are written in Objective C, C, C++, or Javascript, I hope.

I doubt it. If my "job" was to crank out as many spam apps as possible, I would choose a tool that allows for the most efficient means (fast turnaround). Today, straight obj c would probably be my last choice.

It's pretty easy to crank out an iPhone app in Objective C.

Why isn't there a "ignore all apps by this developer" button?

This is one of the reasons why I like using AppSniper. If a developer has a history of making crappy/spammy apps, I have no qualms with ignoring them now and in the future.

I don't know if this is against Apple's TOS, but there's room for a better App store browsing program (like AppSniper and BargainBin) that is targeted towards not-crap programs. Having a developer black-list and a feedback mechanism to nominate developers to this list could go a long way.

There's YC-funded Appsaurus, which tries to predict apps you like based on what you tell it, but I didn't have a great experience with it.

Doesn't this expose the fact that the app store walled garden isn't for the protection of consumers, but for the protection of Apple?

If the original owner of the copyrighted material (logos, design, etc.) issued a DMCA takedown request to Apple wouldn't they have to remove it, or also be culpable for the infringement? As it is, since they are reviewing all of the apps, are they not already partially responsible?

Apple's position is that they're not reviewing the content for IP issues. I don't know if there's precedent for that, but it strikes me as defensible.

And they do respond to takedown requests and there have been several issues arising from such. See: "Edge" trademark brouhaha.

Agree their store is now overflowing with garbage. A simple fix is for somebody with taste to make a curated wrapper/filter around it. Imagine a site/tool which worked otherwise just like the App Store, except that whenever you search or browse, you won't see any garbage. Obviously garbage is subjective, so the trick is for people with similar tastes to coalesce around a single curator. Arguably the independent review sites already fill this role, they just need to support all needed use cases, be consistent with their filtering, and scale up their workflow so they can bless all the new non-garbage that comes out.

Apple needs to restructure the app store so people can make other app stores out of it, and so a better model can be found.

Honestly, their AppStore app (especially on the iPad, but also on the iPhone) violates their HID all over the place, and is a pretty annoying app because of it.

I wish there was a good model between Apple's app store, and Androids. It cant be totally open (because then you get apps that hack bank accounts), but too closed (see: Apple) and you run into really ironic issues, like the one Marco brings up.

HN, what's in between?

The real problem is that pure content is being treated as an application.

There needs to be a separate whole section of the iTunes Store for this shit: Music, Movies, TV, Apps, Interactive. It'd come with its own Webkit-based development environment, like Apple is doing for their new iTunesLP format (and did for Dashboard). The people making these pointless apps don't really give a shit about integrating with the phone, and they aren't doing anything they couldn't do in Mobile Safari -- they're in the App Store to get paid.

Essentially, this is a problem with any "recommendation" system that is based on tagging. There have got to be better ways.

This is an opportunity for Android to race ahead of Apple - by winning at recommendation.

Good luck. Have you used the Android store? I love Android, but the store could use a lot of work. I haven't used the apple store, so I can't compare, but they Android market is a mess.

I haven't; but Google's great strength is searching large datasets for useful results. I can't imagine them not figuring out how to make the Android store work well if they set their minds to it.

Have you tried AppBrain? I like being able to do the shopping on a larger screen and also manage lists of recommendations and future possibilities.

This may become a problem with the Android market too -- in fact, I already see it happening sometimes, when searching for particularly common application words.

I hope that Google/Android system implements some better ranking algorithm in a way that it manages to find which words are actually relevant to an application. Not sure how that'd be done, though.

My original comment might be a bit misleading. Its actually ok to use tagged relation in a market with a large barrier to entry because then its prohibitively expensive to create "spam" entries. This works for Netflix. The problem with the iTunes store here is the low barrier of entry for people to create crappy applications and get them listed.

What percentage of apps are spam? If it is a rather large percentage, it seems like Apple has an incentive to keep them around so that they can advertise they have x thousands of apps. But maybe it is not that large.

This is why it's important that Android gives you 24 hours to "return" any app you buy for a refund.

One of my apps was also targeted by a "spammer" last year, but that spam wasn't as egregious as some of these examples.

For me, one key takeaway from Marco's post is - don't just be annoyed, "the proper procedure is to send a clear notice to appstorenotices@apple.com citing your intellectual property and which apps are infringing it"

However, I'm not sure how responsive Apple will be to these infringement-notices.

Guys, it's really easy to remove IP law infringing app once you ask apple to do so. Apple is under the impression that it's between two people, but if the 'defendant' doesn't really have any solid defense whatsoever, apple will remove it quite quickly. Actually this can be abused, as in that story between two app developers who developed a similar game, which in a real court would be totally fine, but one sent a bogus complaint to apple about the other and being of small resources, the developer couldn't fight it and got his application removed.

I also remember that apple actually quite regularly blocks trademarks in keywords, for example, there was this Yahtzee like game that was being developed by one developer I knew, a valid use for a keyword 'Yahtzee' and was rejected due to Yahtzee being not allowed.

So this kind of copycat keyword infringing stuff although looks bad, is quite easy to fix if you just send an email.

I wrote about something similar but in smaller scale back in March and the apps I talked about were gone after a few days. I'm pretty sure it wasn't because of my text but might have been because I reported those apps as spam on the App Store.

Here's the link: http://iaskwhy.tumblr.com/post/453478706/apple-allows-spam-o...

Not sure this is really a big problem. The top apps are the right ones. 5 star ranking + 8000 reviews. Not much confusion there. I hope Apple does clean up the App Store more in the future but for now I don't see it as being a major problem. Certainly no worse than the typical Google search.

My biggest annoyance about the apple store is when an application is updated and adds advertisements or removes features, there is no way to revert the application or know that the update is bad. Apple provides no path to complain about this, either.

The Android Market has a similar problem with trash apps like http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.prettyapp.s9.girls (NSFW?).

The intekone example: the app names indicate they're cheat sheets.

Apple is lazy.

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