Apple removes $1k featureless iPhone application (2008)
latimesblogs.latimes.com
latimesblogs.latimes.com
That’s not censorship. It’s protecting customers from being duped into buying something they don’t understand and getting ripped off.
TFA quotes an app review where someone felt scammed. The dev is quoted as saying he didn’t want people to buy it by accident and then feel cheated:
> "I don't want to collect money from people who did this by accident and I am glad that Apple returned the money for two orders," Heinrich said.
It sounds like he had good intent, was following the rules. It still wasn’t a good app to be in the App Store.
Conversely, there are countless free apps (Facebook-owned included) which extract far more value than 1,000usd from their users... and the users are completely unaware because the price of the app didn't give them pause.
what really got people (and apple) worked up was the idea that someone could create a "nothing" and make a lot of money with that. now we laugh because we can all create crypto tokens and sell them to naive investors.
While there's undoubtedly an intersection between the set "tech geeks who want to be early adapters" and "people for whom losing $1K is no big deal", they're not identical. Remember that the original iPhone was $399[1]; losing 2.5x the cost of the phone to somebody's dumb software joke would not have just been an "oopsie, I guess we'll have to get a slightly cheaper jar of caviar for afternoon tea, Lovey" moment for a lot of us.
[1]: Technically, it was $599 for the 8GB model, but that initial price only lasted 3 months, and early buyers got a $100 credit in partial offset.
The first iPhone was released in 2007. In 2008 people had only just begun writing apps and publishing to the app store. It's probably fair to say that people were still finding their way around the app store and some people were just curious.
Kids have sometimes ended up dropping thousands of dollars on stupid in-app purchases in games. I'm pretty sure they spent zero time considering the consequences.
Generally I think consumer protections are a good thing.
App Store descriptions were also more prominent at launch than they are today. The developer did nothing to obfuscate what it was nor to try and cheat anyone. The price was there, the description was there. It was exactly what he advertised.
There's no point punishing people for accidentally spending money on a digital product they don't want when the tech involved to reverse that decision is available, ready to use, and won't hurt any parties involved
aka it was bad PR for Apple, so it was removed.
The usual arrangement is that the seller inflates their price a lot, and then the seller provides the product plus a kickback to the person who wants to launder the money. Now the launderer has a real, valid asset, plus optionally some of the overpaid amount in cash. As long as the buyer reports the income and pays taxes, now the seller has laundered the money. I am oversimplifying somewhat, but that's the idea.
A lot of properties have been sold by a certain high profile American politician that way in the last decade. That's a fascinating place to start studying the scheme.
1. Buy/ obtain stolen credit card details.
2. Buy CSGO skins / Purchase steam game as a gift with stolen CC.
3. Sell skins/ game keys through a 3rd party, online marketplace.
4. Collect profits.
Congratulation, you've converted dirty money (used to buy stolen CCs) and potentially dirty money (charges put on stolen CCs) in clean, washed money!
Of course you can do this scheme without the stolen CCs (just buy steam games/ skins) but the CCs have a nice multiplicative effect and they add more obfuscation.
Nothing stops people from gold plating their iPhones or putting it in a jewel encrusted case - if you drop it better then gems take the blow then your phone, right? I’ve heard stories of überrich kids dropping $36k so they can rule on Clash of Clans, and grade school kids blowing their college funds on smurfberries to get ahead in whatever game uses those, and for the most part Apple is happy to let that happen but will step in with refunds to head off any media frenzy.
Has anyone tried to play Blackjack on an iPhone recently? It is almost impossible to find an app that lets you play any casino games without -buying chips- to play. Who is spending $99.99, $19.99, or $9.99 of real money to gamble X amount of fake money with real reward except being on a scoreboard for a day? If you just want to play just for fun you have to go onto web sites.
$1000 isn't enough to charge to establish that someone is meaningfully wealthy; the app should have cost $10 million.
This was someone putting a drawing in an iPhone app bundle with a funny name and charging the highest price that Apple allowed developers to set.
It was brilliant. Made even more brilliant when the people who had actually paid for the app went on line, backpedalling, to explain how they had bought it on accident.
$1000 is rent for many people, it's one half to one third of their salary.
Yeah, 1000 is going to weed out a number of people but its not unreachable, should be more for 1000 we'll examine your financial situation and then grant you the ability to display the icon.
Why would someone spend the time and money to develop an app that is not monetized?
You’d need a server to manage state and that’s an ongoing cost as well. It doesn’t exist because it’s not economical to do so.
In the 1600s, if you bought anything that didn't come from your village or region, that was a big deal. Tulips were an exotic distant foreign luxury (as frankly any flower would be if you could not grow it in your garden already).
People who bought them were not average, they were privileged and wealthy. Surely no peasant was duped into investing their half-month's worth life savings into tulip futures.
Also, Amsterdam was the first stock and commodities exchange in the world as far a we know (or at least in the west, as written by westerners). So peculiar investments should have been more likely.
Ironically, we now live in a world where non-physical creations with non-physical provenance fetch huge sums because... ? (because there is a lot of excess wealth accumulated by a few people who can piss it away without consequence, or because they can buy it with un-tax-reported currency).
Lasting value beyond speculation appears when there is use value. But how do you apply a use value to a token? Well, you can't do it by locking down the nominally encoded asset - that's just a sticker pasted on it. These things do not gatekeep well. The use value comes from someone declaring that the bearer of the token is now entitled to something - a song, a poem, a noble rank. Anyone can do that for any token at any time. That is a thing that a unique, uncensored digital asset could be very relevant towards.
So the interesting part has not really come yet.
It's been 12 years now and Apple still has not managed to find a solution to understanding the difference between excessively expensive scam/child-predatory apps vs justifiably high priced apps.
They have from my POV.
(1) They're rare enough (in a store with 2m+ apps) that we're discussing an bizarre exception from 2008. (2) They offer protections to help avoid the problem (e.g. parental controls). (3) Refunds (in my experience) are painless.
And then in 2015 Apple decided to push for Services Strategy, no longer is App Store mainly used to attract customers, but an extraction of values that lives within the iPhone ecosystem.
Sometime post 2015, what is now known as Reader's apps could no longer be without a Sign up button ( Unless you have specific exemption ). An In-App Real Person teaching class would require IAP ( it was scrapped in after the pandemic ) A $1K featureless Apps becomes a monthly or even weekly fraud subscription.
And the push to everything subscription. While still not offering upgrade pricing for software.
It also, of course, transmits your fixed and unchangeable system serial number to Apple to obtain any apps. You can't opt out of this.
But we all know why they want that data. It's not a technical necessity.
The $1K app seems like an early example of how "apps" marketed through Apple (App Store) were immediately being used by "developers" to gather personal information about Apple users, such as indicia of net worth. Having identified a segment of users willing to pay $1K for nothing, via an "app" download, seems like it would be instantly valuable to online advertisers.
Coupled along with other data sources, it can frequently give street address or phone number.
They abused over 30,000 customers in 2019 in this manner per their own transparency report.
All for data they didn't need to collect in the first place.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
Nowadays, this app would probably be at least 20 MB of bloat.
At least Google still carries it.
'I Am Rich' makes author exactly that, does little else - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=268105 - Aug 2008 (13 comments)
Others?
I don’t know if anyone actually bought it. I think the description stated that it really didn’t do anything but was just for bragging rights.
It should not be possible to buy anything this expensive with a press of a button. They should ask for additional, confirmations, even call the buyer if it's this much.
Also unconditional refund should be available for every app during at least some time after it's purchased. I actually had no idea Apple users can't return an app they don't want.
> But Apple couldn't pull it down before curious aristocrats -- eight of them -- had purchased it. Six people from the United States, one from Germany and one from France dropped a grand for the gem in the first 24 hours it was available, Heinrich said.
This was shortly after the App Store opened, when it was theoretically possible for Apple to have reasonable awareness of its contents and respond to customer feedback. Clearly, the company wanted to protect its customers from getting ripped off. Likely, there were things added to their process for app review to prevent this from happening again in the future. But they can't possibly stay on top of all the edge and corner cases where an inexperienced reviewer misses a detail.
Am I saying that they can't do better than they do now? No. I'm not excusing their multiple failures. There are lots of obvious scams, such as high-cost subscriptions with dark patterns to induce accidental sign-up. But this sorta makes the case, to me, at least, that some degree of regulation needs to be applied to the industry. And until reading this, I was mostly against government types who don't understand the industry from stepping in.
I don't get it. We've had lots of obvious scam apps available for ages. We've had problem with moderation. We could see lots of faults with both the marketplace and apple's policies.
But what tips the scale for you was an app which literally said in the description it does nothing and is just a status symbol? It wasn't even trying to trick anyone. Why is that bad in any way?
If it's been a long time, all bets are off.
I don’t mean to sound contentious, but I think most HN users realize that a retail employee is fairly powerless for things that aren’t retail. A physical store is not the proper channel for such a request. Did you redirect her to file a request online?
I think this is BS. It’s not uncommon for me to do a quick web search on behalf of a parent who is less savvy. I typically find what they’re looking for (such as the current COVID vax protocol in their city) on the first attempt. I assume you have the same ability.
> I assumed that the store employee could redirect her if necessary.
This is fair. I can see why this might be expected.
There should be a clearly defined way for doing this instead of a faceless, opaque bureaucracy that regular people can’t understand. In this sense big tech is very similar to US healthcare. As user you are pretty much at their mercy. Maybe they feel like helping, maybe not.
The invoice email for each app has a link for problems with purchases.
Every single App purchase has this.
It’s not on the user to know the internal management of the company
I think it had (some) merit as a work of art, and didn’t try to scam people. It ‘just’ turned out that people didn’t realize/believe that button signaling “expensive” really meant it.
I think it’s similar to recalling a child’s toy that turns out to have a dangerous feature. Yes, shops shouldn’t sell those, but sometimes, toys get used in unforeseen ways.