Study Finds Up to 2% of Top 1,000 Paid Apps on App Store Were Scams

[w5jck]

A friend's SO has an iPhone 11 and mostly plays games on it. Neither of them are tech savvy in any way. He has an Android phone, and he constantly has app issues because Google refuses to police their app store. Apple does police their store, but you can only catch so many scammers no matter how much you police. Plus the average user is not tech savvy, and probably not that bright over all either. My friend's SO iPhone kept giving her messages that a virus had been detected and that she needed to immediately buy a certain anti-virus software to get rid of it. It took me a LONG time to convince them that the messages were generated by a rogue app that was scamming them, and not generated by iOS. She finally figured out which game app was scamming her and deleted it, then the messages stopped. I had to argue with them quite a while to convince them to simply delete the app rather than buy the bogus virus protection app.

There are a LOT of gullible people in the world, and they are easily scammed. There are still plenty of people who fall for phone and snail mail scams everyday, even though those specific scams have been around and commonly known about for decades.

 

[Khedron]

Worse: Apple will not refund money paid for frauds. A dictionary I bought was not as described--not remotely--and I sent Apple proof of this. They denied all responsibility.

Did you try going through your credit card for a refund?

 

[ThatGuyInLa]

There are way too many apps that do the monthly and even WEEKLY subscription crap. $5, $10, $25, all for “background images” or maybe even animated versions. Ooooo. :|

 

[citysnaps]

Oh noes... you mean only 98% of the 2 million App Store apps are not scams? Please...someone tell why there isn't 100.0% perfection in the App Store like there is with everything else in the world.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Anyone else remember the 'I am Rich' app

That wasn’t a scam, though. It did precisely what it said, it let folks know that you have $999 to spend on an app and, thus, at least by THAT measure, you’re rich.

 

[szw-mapple fan]

98% doesn’t sound so bad at first glance, but the number compounds as you download more apps. I have 36 apps installed on my phone. If you download 36 apps from this list, you only have a 48% change that you haven’t been scammed.

That’s only if you were downloading apps purely randomly from that 1000. In reality the 48% should be higher, since people will gravitate toward more known apps/brands. I would imagine the scam rate from the top 100 for example would be much lower.

 

[argon2020]

Whether an app is a scam or not, Apple is still making their 30% cut on the sale. They therefore have no incentive to take down apps with a high sales volume, regardless of whether or not they're legitimate.

 

[szw-mapple fan]

It would be nice if it was possible to have zero scam and spam apps but that’s unrealistic. There’s always room to improve, though. Having one gateway does make it more likely to have bad actors filtered out than many gateways.

I think it would be best for apple to allow some some sanctioned way for third party payment systems. Maybe a 5% commission for those?

I would prefer it the way they do it for Sign In with Apple. Users can choose what they want to use but Apple’s payment must always be an option.

 

[Wildkraut]

App review rules 😂

20 Apps of top 1000, how many millions of Apps does the AppStore offer? Sum up! What a save place 🤣, security by obscurity, Apples App Review just serves to kill the competition, milk customers and devs.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Really tired of fake reviews.

isn’t this some type of a fraud. Making consumers purchase apps through fake reviews?

I rate this post 4.895 stars.

 

[neuropsychguy]

Easily fixed if Apple assigns some of its employees to act as part-time "App Store Police".

I thought the easy fix is to allow multiple app stores on iPhones and multiple ways to process payments. Then consumers can choose to use the most secure system...

 

[szw-mapple fan]

Whether an app is a scam or not, Apple is still making their 30% cut on the sale. They therefore have no incentive to take down apps with a high sales volume, regardless of whether or not they're legitimate.

Their incentive is maintaining trust in their platforms. Sure they might have gained that 30% from that particular scam app but they might lose out on many other future payments because that user would be much more hesitant in paying for something else when they realize it’s a scam. There are plenty of alternative apps that can give Apple the same revenue. There’s no reason they wouldn’t weed out the scams.

 

[neuropsychguy]

Apple is really nothing more than smoke and mirrors done on a glamorous grand scale.

You forgot your sarcasm tag.

 

[contacos]

Really tired of fake reviews.

isn’t this some type of a fraud. Making consumers purchase apps through fake reviews?

There are also those Apps that only take the in-app review to the AppStore if you rate them 4 or 5, anything lower and it goes into their internal feedback ticket system instead.

 

[slineaudi]

Imagine if 2% of the highest paid doctors didn’t even have medical degrees.

It's a bit silly to compare medicine to apps that scan QR codes.

 

[gregohb]

This isn't great and Apple needs to work much harder. You see tons of apps with hundreds (sometimes thousands) of 1-star reviews all saying 'scam' and the apps are not removed.

All that being said - what percent of the top 1,000 paid apps were scams on the other app stores? My perception is they're much higher.

Trying to report bad apps and getting refunds is worse than dealing with the DMV. Apple is apparently too comfortable taking money from customers to make a robust review and refund system like Amazon has (somewhat).

 

[Drogba11]

I don’t even use apps with IAP anymore, all it has done is encourage subscription models on everything from calculators to weather apps. Apple are to blame for pushing devs to use IAP rather than a 1 time fee.

 

[travelsheep]

I guess E V E R Y O N E who ever browsed and downloaded from the Apple Appstore knew that. I would say it's much more than 2%.

But for some reason somebody got a fish to fry now and that's why there's a big "fuzz"...

 

[szw-mapple fan]

Anyone else remember the 'I am Rich' app

Ah the good old days of the early App Store. At least I am Rich was honest about what it was. In fact, the sequel by the same dev, “I am Richer LE”, is on the App Store to this day.

 

[slineaudi]

ought the easy fix is to allow multiple app stores on iPhones and multiple ways to process payments. Then consumers can choose to use the most secure system...

Who would provide guidance on which store and which payment system is the most secure?

 

[gregohb]

Apple is really nothing more than smoke and mirrors done on a glamorous grand scale.

Well they have some good products - but they sell us $1200 iPhones that are nothing more than "made in China" for $200 devices, and pocket the profit. Same thing with App Store - they take their 30% for doing almost nothing, and then make it hard to get refunds or deal with bad apps or mis-advertised apps. Perhaps they need to return to designing innovative products rather than striving to be the richest company in the US.

 

[PlayUltimate]

Looks like padded statistics: QR code reader apps are scam because it is built-into the iOS. Well, so are calendars, notes, and reminders. Does that make Fantastical, Notability, and Things scam apps?

 

[rp100]

If I take the top 1000 apps in the App Store, the number of downloads are not perfectly distributed amongst all of them. i.e., if that pool of apps recorded 1 billion total downloads, each app did not get 1 million downloads. If anything, the #1000 app probably got 10,000 or fewer downloads (.001% of total downloads). The main article and comments are suggesting that 2% of ALL top 1000 downloads are malicious. That seems highly unlikely as this cohort of apps is going to receive the most scrutiny. They wrote, “there were 18 apps that The Post defined as being scams among Apple’s top grossing apps” but in another sentence casually mention that was the top 1000 apps. They never tell us where in the top 1000 those appeared.

The stats we should see: assuming 1 billion total downloads amongst the entire pool of top-1000 apps, how many downloads were for a scam app? How many of those downloads resulted in a customer making a charge? How many of those charges were ultimately refunded by Apple by request? Did Apple retroactively refund all those customers after the scams were identified?

I don’t expect six-sigma performance out of the App Store review process, but I do expect Apple to try as hard as possible and make things right when money is taken. The WaPo article is super disingenuous: they complain about Apple not doing enough. Apple claims they shut down 470k developer accounts. WaPo then complains that Apple did too much because now the low-hanging fruit is gone and the remaining scams are harder to identify.

I can appreciate a well-argued hit piece, but this one was lacking.

edit:
FYI: you can get around the paywall by enabling ‘reader view’ in safari.

 

[Apple_Robert]

I hope the scammed folks got their money back.

 

[mikethemartian]

Or we could report this another way. 98% of the top paid apps were NOT scams.

That should be Apple’s new tagline.