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.
The top apps list is constantly changing. A fraud app might be number 900 on the list of top 1000 but could have spent days or weeks in the top 10 where it got massive exposure from Apple.