iTunes accounts hacked by shady developer? | Hacker News Reader

iTunes accounts hacked by shady developer?

alexbrie.com

50 pointsjeb20 comments

This headline seems a bit misleading. The blog post is from today, describing a problem that the developer had brought to his attention yesterday. Perhaps this should be revised to the title of the post: "iTunes accounts hacked by shady developer?"?

Agreed: "You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it."

I believe the situation has been like this for more than a week, I observed this more than a week ago, leading to the editorial slant.

Some proof, take a look here: http://www.appexplorer.com/a/367996918/

I actually started on June 14th, so about 3 weeks, without any reaction from Apple.

To calculate the daily income of this guy:

$5 per app and he has 50 apps in the top 100. Daily sales are about 30 for each app, so total of 1500 sales per day. At $5, he's making $7500 a day.

In the 3 weeks he has exploited this hack: $157 Thousand dollars. I wonder who is paying for that.

As another Book developer, this is probably true.

We have Free Books and Free Audiobooks, usually #1 and #2 paid book apps in the list. There is a bunch of fluctuation (competitors get featured, NYT plugs, etc), but the Top 20 is consistent. This is Weird with a capital W.

However, this is probably a very limited account breach- below #10 volume in Books is pretty low, 200-300/day or so. Top 5 is much higher, so it's telling that the hack didn't get apps into the Top 5.

Yesterday there was an app called "A mirror" at the top of the Top Grossing list selling for $499.99. The developer, SufPay, has no website listed and has only released one app. The app displays images of picture frames that are simply black in the center; that's it. It's by a different developer, but it definitely seems to be part of a similar scheme.

I checked just now, and the price has changed to 99¢, but it's scary to think that a completely useless app 'sold' enough copies at $500 a pop to become the top grossing app on the app store.

I think I've heard of this trick. What the developers do is that they make the app expensive ($500), then they purchase it with promo-codes, leading to it going into the top-grossing list. Then they switch it to 99cents, but since it takes some time for it to slide off the top-grossing list, a lot of people buy the app. This gives it enough sales to break into the top 100 of the category charts, and it will then use that momentum to rise up.

Devs use such tricks - if you keep in touch with the forum, you'll see some crazy stuff people are doing to sell.

Well that's a bit of a relief. I thought they were actually charging $500 to unsuspecting account holders.

You're right about people buying the app after it drops in price. When it was $500 it had two obviously fake 5/5 reviews. Now it has an additional 40 reviews, 1/3 of which are additional fake reviews, 2/3 of which are 1-star reviews shocked that their iPhone didn't magically turn reflective.

sigh

If the mechanism speculated in the article is true (app developer hacking iTunes accounts and buying his own apps), then a crime has been committed, and It would be irresponsible of Apple to "respond" (in a visible way) until proper steps had been taken.

The only proper steps they need to take are to backup the situation before tossing the fraudster and his impact. That should just take a couple of hours.

I notice at the end of the article, the author states: "I hope someone at apple catches wind of this."

Which makes me wonder, have any of us contacted apple yet, or are we all just hoping they'll notice this on their own?

Apple is on the case, if you read the follow-up. Also, the last time something like this happened, Apple was very pro-active, fixed the issue really quickly.

I think the problem was really just that Apple didn't know about it.

If apple would give more legitimate options of marketing apps in the AppStore devs would not stoop so low. There is no tracking, no in-store ads, nothing you can do besides playing the popularity game.

you could befriend some hipster a-bloggers that would cover your apps. (though I hate those bloggers)

And that's exactly what I hate about the AppStore: it's one big popularity contest. I've had one of my apps dip into the US Top 100 this weekend thanks to a random mention in the NY Times. While the attention is nice, I experience the lack of control over these kinds of media events as truly depressing.

So why not try and take control of the media events?

This is why people have PR and Marketing staff... They go out and help create the stories and influence how the media report on product and services.

While that's nice if you have the cash to spend, for most indie devs that is just not an option. If you have suggestions on how to do this on the cheap, check out this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1485783

apple will respond. they just need some time to take action. for mr nugyen it will end like for the last bunch of chinese guys who got all their apps thrown out, their licenses revoked and no money paid out.

Sure, take time to gather evidence, work with authorities and document the crime. But there is no good reason to leave those apps in the top seller lists once they've discovered the problem.

Please stop with the App store in the first position of HN. There are so much better article and stuff to know about. Thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com