Night Vision+ to be taken OFF the App Store

[01Shambrook]

Wirelessly posted (Joey's iPhone 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-gb) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

I would like to direct everyones attention to this app, which has currently broke into the top 50 paid apps in the UK.
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/night-vision/id390653138?mt=8
It claims to have true night vision, it has a 4 star rating, and it's main 'website' is actually a sister site of Appshopper. Need I say more?
I find it really stupid that Apple are concentrating all their efforts on making sure they get more money while allowing customers to get blatantly ripped off like this by false developers.

 

[psonice]

I fully agree, this app has all the appearance of a rip-off. Although I really have to point out that I'm an iphone dev with a rival nightvision app (link: http://itunes.apple.com/app/true-nightvision/id407897439 ).

Maybe I'm a little biased, but what I can say is I've tried most of the nightvision apps out there - some are pretty good, some are pretty bad. This one? It just shows the normal camera coloured green with a picture on top. No nightvision at all. And it's pretty badly made.

Hmm.. hold on, something is strange here. When I've looked at this before, after an update (it was updated very regularly with trivial changes) there would be a raft of 5* reviews, all with extremely generic text that might apply to any app (i.e. likely fake/paid reviews). Then a torrent of 1* "does not work" reviews. The update would clear the old reviews, and give it an initial good rating, so it always looks good in the listings.

But now: I just see a small number of 5* reviews (including one saying it's rubbish.. doh!) and a lot of 1*s. Apple just changed their developer guidelines, maybe they cleaned up the store? If so, this is GREAT news for all the decent/honest devs! Or perhaps I'm remembering the wrong app, but I'm sure it was this one.

Is it actually getting removed from the store though? Or was that just a wish?

Oh, and on night-vision apps in general: none of them offer true night vision, it's not possible with the iphone hardware. They work in low light, like after dusk, but not in full darkness. The best ones will enhance the image so you can see when it's fairly dark (mine will show an image when the built-in camera shows pure black). Quality gets worse the darker it gets, and it won't see better than your own eyes.

They're still cool though if you keep that in mind, and great for photography when it's a bit too dark

 

[01Shambrook]

Wirelessly posted (Joey's iPhone 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-gb) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Unfortunately, it's just a wish. This app is crawling slowly up the top paid 50 apps in the UK still, despite the wave of bad reviews.

This is certainly not the first time this sort of happened (a company called Presselite posted loads of fake reviews to try and beat sales of a much more successful developer called Malcolm Barclay), and Apple should be doing more than it is currently doing to get rid of this.

As for you being a developer of a 'night vision' app, I have respect for the fact that you've at least attempted to make the night vision as good as possible, despite the hardware limitations. This other developer just does nothing but slap a green sticker on the front and then send in 5 star reviews to bring the sales in. It's shameful.

 

[psonice]

Well, for apps like this you can report it to apple. I'd do that myself for this one, but coming from a rival developer it might look a bit suspect To do that (this works ONLY for apps you have bought/installed):

- Go into the app store on the phone (possibly this works in itunes too, not tried it)
- Find the app, open it up. Down near the bottom you'll see 'Report a Problem'. Fire away

(You also use this to report any problems with the app to apple, but of course *contact the developer first* if it's a bug or something. The developer can fix it, apple can't.)

 

[r6girl]

I would like to direct everyones attention to this app, which has currently broke into the top 50 paid apps in the UK.
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/night-vision/id390653138?mt=8
It claims to have true night vision, it has a 4 star rating, and it's main 'website' is actually a sister site of Appshopper.

To be clear, that site is not at all related to AppShopper. It is like AppShopper but it is not related to AppShopper in any way. AppShopper is also owned and run by Arnold Kim, the founder of MacRumors.

 

[Mike Oxard]

This app is still in the store with a 3* rating despite nearly all the 340+ reviews being 1*. Apple are having the wool pulled over their eyes here.