Apple urged to root out rating scams as developer highlights enforcement failure
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The problem strikes at the core of the value of the their app store. Good, real apps should have good ratings and preferred placement. Bad/fake/scammy apps should not.
But this is a tough problem to get right.
If your criteria for "bad" are too broad you will catch legitimate apps, harming legit developers and their users.
Yet, if your criteria leave even a little room scammers can find and exploit it.
The scammer's job is to find any and all loopholes to exploit. They will find a small crack and drive a tank through it. The legit app developer's job is to make good apps. They can inadvertently stumble over even simple restrictions, at times.
Take this tricky dynamic and tackle it at scale, and it becomes an order of magnitude more difficult.
I kinda wonder if they shouldn't charge, say $100 to list an app on the App Store and $50-$100 per update too. It's going to cut down on scam apps and pay for enforcement. Sadly it would cut down on legit apps too. But it might be worth it overall.
Which of the problems exposed in the original twitter thread would be solved by adding these payments?
Which should in theory get rid of a lot of scam submissions.
Scammers need an order of magnitude or more iteration over a legit dev to be very effective, so a per release fee will hit them much harder than legit devs.
I don't think fees like this are a good idea. There is a lot of interesting/ free software out there which would be discouraged. Maybe just withholding payment on apps for the first 30 days until reviews start coming in and giving users better tools for reporting scam apps.
I do however think reviewers should be given a more thorough check-list on apps which charge more than $20 or $10/ month. An app which suddenly gets a bunch of 1 star reviews should be a red flag and trigger a review as well.
This is not a new problem by any means. Apple has been largely ignoring it for many years, only taking action when there's bad PR like now.
Say they get bonuses based on the most recent 6 months or 1 year, but if becoming more strict with the App Store apps would make Apple lose money the nearest year (since Apple makes money thanks to the scams), then maybe the problem is almost unfixable?
It's worth noting that for genuine developers this will incentivize less regular app releases, and push the barrier to entry to be in the app store higher, neither of which is really desirable for a 'trendy' app store.
Really the only way I see is for Apple to get better at moderating the apps & reviews on their own app store. I mean, that is part of the deal. if you run a market, you need to make sure the people selling in it are trading fairly, otherwise people will stop coming to your market.
With regard to paying for this... well, Apple made $55B profit (not revenue, profit!) in 2019[1] (couldn't find any figures for 2020). I'm sure they'll find some money somewhere.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...
Many of these apps that game the App Store generate enough revenue that a $100 fee won't be a barrier to entry, but will certainly be a barrier to entry for students, hobbyists, and developers whose apps are pre-revenue.
Most apps don't make more than a few hundred to a few thousand dollars over their entire lifetimes, and such a fee will disincentivize ever pushing feature, stability or security updates to them.
> It's going to cut down on scam apps and pay for enforcement.
The App Store generates billions of dollars of revenue and pays for its own enforcement many times over, it's just that Apple can increase their App Store profits even more through poor enforcement and turning a blind eye to manipulation and scam apps.
What would really benefit users is real competition in the mobile app distribution market. It is obvious that Apple and Google are poor stewards of this space and that competition can improve experiences for consumers and developers.
An obvious move for scammers would be to flood the alternate app store with fake versions of popular apps in the hope that a bunch of people would accidentally install them. Many users are not sophisticated and a scam only needs a few victims to make money.
The alternate app store would struggle to moderate against that, and since Apple has no way to reach in and fix it, they would have to cut off an alternate app store at some point when it gets too bad. And then everyone would lose their minds over that.
This sounds a lot like you believe that if Apple or Google fail or refuse to do something, then it can't be done. It's in their interests to pay as little as they possibly need to in order to keep the App Store and Play Store money hoses operating.
If there was competition in the mobile app distribution market, then I'd agree that it's in their interests to curate their app stores, because competition would wipe them out otherwise.
Unfortunately, Apple and Google have leveraged their duopoly in the mobile operating system market to prevent competitors from competing with them in, and improving, the mobile app distribution market.
> An obvious move for scammers would be to flood the alternate app store with fake versions of popular apps in the hope that a bunch of people would accidentally install them.
There are dozens of app stores for other computing devices and operating systems where this isn't a problem. Competition means that no user is forced to use a poorly curated mobile app store like they are currently forced to use Apple's poorly curated App Store.
Wouldn’t that be race to the bottom tho?
I don't particularly care if better efficiency means that Apple and Google are forced to adapt and compete, and as a result, might be less profitable than they were when they held a duopoly in the mobile app distribution market.
A cost per app release drives a stake into the general approach. It doesn’t stop scammers but makes it much harder to do on a larger scale.
Meanwhile, legit developers spend hundreds or thousands or more hours on a good app. $100 in the first world just isn’t that much. At the very least the opportunity cost (e.g., the money that could’ve have been made if the time had been spent in a more convention job) easily dwarfs the amount. In lower-income places, then a commensurate amount makes sense.
Right now, macOS treats those apps as if they're radioactive because I didn't spend the $100/year it costs to notarize the apps. The result is that some users suddenly think the apps they've been using are either broken or malicious.
That $100 is already a barrier, if I had to pay more money to release apps at all for Apple devices, I just wouldn't.
Which brings me back to my main point:
> Many of these apps that game the App Store generate enough revenue that a $100 fee won't be a barrier to entry, but will certainly be a barrier to entry for students, hobbyists, and developers whose apps are pre-revenue.
The cost barrier might stop a handful of script kiddies, but it will do nothing to stop the malicious apps bringing in $300k a month in revenue which are both more prolific and widespread.
> Meanwhile, legit developers spend hundreds or thousands or more hours on a good app. $100 in the first world just isn’t that much.
I don't know what country you're in, but I'm in the US and it's a country where not having $100 can mean not eating, making rent or buying medicine that you need. There are a lot of students, hobbyists and those that are trying to break into the industry who are in this boat. Your proposal would make it hard for them to release an app.
There are also people in this country who are either wealthy enough, or their income is high enough, that they wouldn't notice a $100 change in their budget. Your proposal wouldn't affect their ability to release an app, but they would benefit from a lack of competition.
In the end, users would suffer from the lack of competition, and people without means would be priced out of participating in the market.
originally I was going with the idea that an app cannot charge monthly, or by feature, more money than what it originally cost to purchase the app from the store. however this would exclude a lot of reasonable apps.
so instead clicking on any application will immediately display all possible charges that could be incurred when installing and using the application. so if a developer has one of those $299 activation clauses it is clearly listed on the app store. if an app will not reveal all post install charges it should be delisted.
of course people could bypass apple payment systems and there are many who want to bypass apple entirely but that wild wild west scenario may send people back screaming
I mean the App Store already puts whether an app has in-app purchases literally right next the the download button, and the app’s listing has a complete set of possible purchases. So basically already there.
I don’t think you can bypass Apple’s payment system, that’s a big no-no. They want their cut!
It's been going on for years, when exactly will they start taking it seriously?
I wanted to find a QR code scanner the other day so I could debug the qr codes I was generating and the first app on the store was asking me to sign up for a subscription before I could start scanning codes. Who is paying a subscription to scan qr codes??
If Apple can't stop gaming of reviews, malicious apps, developers getting hurt then they fail on this. I really don't want to see the App Store go the way of Amazon listings in terms of reviews, but it really is starting to get hard to defend.
For example I sell stuff on Etsy, I have about 50~ 5 star reviews if I get one 1 star review my average is now 4.92 which is still 5 stars. So it's really not that big of a deal, if I had say a 4.8 with 40,000 ratings a series of a 100 in a row 1 star reviews will do nothing to my score of 4.8.
If I for say had five 5 star reviews and got one 1 star review, my average is 4.3 which will show a 4.5 (or a 4 star depending on how they round) at the star rating.
If you are new you have zero room to get a bad review, even if you fix it. There are version reviews, etc that can fix that but, largely you're done.
I really have no idea of how to redo this, but I don't think people should be giving a 5 star review with a comment. There should be considerations, reviews after a certain time should expire, you should be able to mark reviews as fixed, etc.
I believe the current system is completely broken and needs to be adjusted a bit more then hiring some additional staff to read reviews.
But mostly on the app side, reviews are favored to 5 stars. (As you can trigger review request)
Main problem is fake reviews.
Apple's goal is to provide a great experience.
Searching for a thing and having to wade through a bunch of crapware or install some scammy garbage is not a good experience, let alone a great one.
So even though it's not necessarily Apple's "Fault", it is in their best interest to fix it.
It's also good developer relations, something they need to focus on a bit more. This is one of the places where Apple can really be focused to demonstrate the value developers are getting for that developer commission.
Apple allowing companies to advertise scammy "alternatives" against App Store searches does not help acheive this goal.
They wouldn't let me submit an app: "Faceboook", they similarly shouldn't allow scammers do the same for anyone.
I think we can just do away with app reviews and the star system. Let the internet and all of its communities decide what they think of apps. I trust HN's recommendations for apps more than I do the App store ratings, or some random tech blog, or even reddit. Most people have sources they trust way more than the rating systems, so might as well just do away with it.
On the other hand, this would probably cause app ratings to tend much more strongly towards the median, which could make them less effective signals of quality.
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------|====----------In fact, in Apple's early days, every time someone uninstalled an app they used to prompt for a rating, which of course was highly skewed for 1 star ratings. Why else are people uninstalling.
I've also found that there is almost never a middle ground - it's a 5 star or a 1 star. This basically makes the ratings almost worthless. How is the same app so terrible it gets the lowest of the low for some people and yet the highest praise from others.
I have some apps I make for fun. They do have some users, they usually get terrible ratings, but I've found - and I'm glad my income isn't tied to these apps - that I usually just ignore the ratings and just keep trying to make the apps better.
Perhaps a more effective solution would be for Apple to aggressively legally pursue bad actors like the group that churns out these apps. Make them hurt financially as an example to the next people who might entertain similar ideas.
If Apple doesn’t start handling this better, eventually there will only be bad/fake apps on the store. Real developers will widely choose not to play the losing game.
Maybe a year or so ago Amazon started to aggressively pursue legal action against a few people who were abusing their return process. People who were clearly and egregiously stealing millions of dollars from Amazon via fraudulent returns. I haven’t seen any follow-up reporting but I would love to know the numbers behind the cost/benefit. It doesn’t seem to have had any impact on customer experience and I have to imagine there were others similarly abusing the process who have since stopped. I suspect the approach has largely paid off.
Keeping out shovelware while also allowing rudimentary but useful apps by new developers is a much harder problem.
They aren’t really connected in any particular way.
There have been many cases ( like Hey ) where Apple justification for removing apps was "We saw you're making money, therefore give us money, even tho we provide zero added value".
This is just something you made up.
Apple’s justification was quite different.
So I do not think Apple will do anything here...
I don't actually know what the ideal solution is, but they have the resources and the data to address it in a way nobody else does.
I'm not saying it's easy, or cheap, but it has to happen.
Make it happen, Apple. This problem is a submarine, and it will torpedo you if you don't.
People doing the real ratings are not getting any direct benefit from the work to rate.
However, people doing fake ratings are getting direct monetary benefits.
Which of these two groups do you think will create more ratings?
For a consumer, I think the only thing that ultimately works is something like consumer reports which people pay money for and which do not accept any money or gifts or free samples from the makers of the stuff getting reviewed.
* Charging $8 a week seems hard to justify in pretty much any situation. Why not enforce a max cap on app subscription fees? I assume these apps use Apple's payment system, so they can control that.
* Fake reviews are only as effective as their exposure. Assuming spoofing location is hard, for example GPS-based location is used exclusively, if Apple limited ratings and review availability based on location (put review data in a quadtree, for example) scammers would have to go through more hoops to ensure their fake reviews are effective.
** Of course, if location is based only on IP or other spoofable data this becomes much easier to circumvent.
* Keeping reviews visible only if the user regularly uses the app ensures there's an extra cost to generating fake reviews as they have to be maintained.
As a developer you have a relationship with Apple, but not with your user. Since Apple is sitting in between both parties as middleman. Apple refund any purchase without first asking the Developers and this mechanism has been abused quote a lot in Gaming.
And because of that Apple has a duty to sort these IP, copyright, scam out. Right now Apple is refusing to do anything and suggest it is not their problem. ( Until the press start running stories on it )
Apple, You can't have it both ways.
Refund abuse is something all stores deal with and write off.
Scams on the other hand are a problem that Apple must deal with.
Nowhere has Apple suggested that it isn’t their problem. If they don’t solve it, they will suffer.
Apple isn’t having anything ‘both ways’.
Will they? They shipped defective keyboards for years and they seem to be doing just fine. The idea that "companies who do bad things will be punished in the marketplace thanks to the free market" is juvenile and relies on a false belief in a just world.
Sure there are people willing to switch OS but most people buy macs for macOS, not the shiny shell.
A high class laptop running windows is about as much competition to a macbook as a glass of water is to a pint of lager.
I guarantee Apple is only doing these things because the market reception of their 2016+ MacBooks has been less than stellar.
They were forced to change direction. Just not on your timescale.
They took a serious hit to their reputation, and they fixed the problem.
If they were still introducing new models with the broken keyboards, you would have a point.
Yes but don’t traditional retailers purchase the stock up front? Then they’re writing down losses on their own books, I doubt they’re charging back losses from shoplifting to Nabisco and Duracell.
I’d give you this point if Apple bought the rights to distribute apps from developers, and then ate the losses for refunds, but it’s the exact opposite. Developers pay for the right to distribute, then lose the refund money when their product is used and then “returned.” They aren’t getting compensated for the incurred server costs from the fraudulent usage period either.
App Store developers could certainly form a trade association and do all sorts of things to advance their own interests. It works great for realtors, doctors, lawyers, oil companies, etc.
But IME software developers tend to see themselves as free-wheeling innovators and resist typical professional organizing.
2. The App Store was based entirely on the iTunes Music Store, and that's an extremely bad model for selling software. There are "bad" songs in the iTunes Music Store, but that's largely a matter of personal musical taste, and none of the songs are scams, because iTunes is not an open system where anyone can pay $99 for a "music developer" account and submit songs. The music for sale there was all written by legitimate professional musicians.
Moreover, music customers generally don't need technical support, or refunds, except maybe in the case of a mistaken purchase. The ratings and reviews for songs are mainly about taste, not evaluating whether the song "works correctly". And songs are generally quite cheap, so you're not going to lose much money buying a "bad" song.
This entire model is simply not appropriate for software. If an app doesn't work right, the customer needs technical support, and if it still doesn't work right, then the customer needs a refund. There should be exactly 0 apps in the App Store that are scams or don't work at all. Ratings and reviews are not a good way to "police" this. Every song in the iTunes Music Store "works", in the respect that it plays the expected music when you press play.
The iTunes Music Store doesn't need to be curated much by Apple, because the music is already "curated" by the record labels. Same with the TV shows and movies for sale there, "curated" by the Hollywood studios. But there's no such thing for apps, and that's why the crap store is full of scams. The record labels and movie studios have large amounts of time and money invested in each of their products. This is not true of Apple's App Store, where each app gets maybe a 20 minute review, which is almost nothing in comparison.
Of course, the producer who profits from sales, and the news media who profits from ads should be trusted to come together and produce perfectly trustworthy product reviews...
The perverse relationship between advertisers and media outlets make me incredibly skeptical of content creators who produce reviews. I can only think of a few off the top of my head that I trust.
That's not who I meant by the professional news media.
Apple could look at how many ratings someone gives, how long they have been customers, whether they have ever stepped foot in an actual Apple store, etc.
It would be trivial to make a ratings trust schema using such information
It isn't easy, but it is absolutely necessary. Particularly it should be straight forward for developers to submit complaints about copycat software that is namesquatting or abusive.
What we need is real competition in the mobile app distribution market. Surely companies can compete on efficiency with that 15-30% cut, or less, and the benefits of that competition will be passed on to users and developers who aren't just Apple.
Right now it just looks like money printing press.
BACK IN MY DAY (the 90s?)
You could go to the shitty Mall and have some fun spitting off the balcony or you could go to the good Mall and have some fun trying on stuff at Hollister.
The difference was that if you tried to spit off the balcony at the good mall; you were DIRTY! (havent heard anyone say dirtyKids in a little while).
Spitting-off-the-balcony was like the PURPOSE of the Shitty Mall! Preppy kids spit on Dirty kids at the Shitty Mall!
Or maybe... Even as a teenager; I had enough respect for a place-kept-clean that I would have felt like an ASS for fucking up the good mall.
There is no more "Good Mall".
Friendly, Legitimate, Genuine, Purposeful Interaction seems to be a rare gem today. or worse; a bait-and-switch.
Many elderly folks feel that the only way to win is not to play.
This is not healthy! This is melting our brains!
There's no Chart, Graph, Gauge, or Dashboard. No way to measure the affect of this universally shared neurosis.
If "Dark Patterns" were Poison; we'd all be dead now.
Maybe it just takes longer.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/08/apples-app-store-had-gross-s...
> The phone and tablet scene is trash and it’s mostly the fault of Google and Apple.
Not even sure what you are talking about. Lots of great software out there. It can be a pain to find amidst some of the junk, but it's not that hard.
IAPs are somewhat of a different story, but even those are pretty niche for me. Do people really need that much...stuff?
I think I've bought more apps on my iPad than on my Mac. My phone not quite so many, but I've bought a few. Mostly not many because I don't use my phone as much as my iPad or my Mac.
I recently bought Calca for my phone (iOS) and it's truly awesome software to have in my pocket. Well worth the $7 CAD or whatever it was. I gladly support this kind of work.