App Store problems: Scam apps, review process.

If you an iPhone user or ever used an iPhone or other Apple device then you know what is App Store, a place to discover and download apps. For more than a decade Apple tries to ensure the consumer that App Store is a safe place, a trusted place and you can be 100% sure that privacy & security will be guaranteed when you will download an app on your device.

I’m working as an iOS developer for more than 10 years, and when I think about App Store, security, privacy, and high standards are not the words that pop up in my head, I would say, totally contrary. I will try to give examples and not my personal opinion, so you can better understand why I’m writing this article, so you can feel my pain. You can open App Store and download the first 10 apps from “Weather”, “Wallpaper”, “QR code reader”, “AdBlocker” and other popular keywords from Search ADS, and from these 10 apps, 80% are scam apps.

What are scam apps?

Scam apps are applications that give consumers a false sense of security and a false idea that the app is great as you’re entering it through a glowing App Store page with raving reviews. But nobody knows that most of the reviews are fake, and their mission is not giving users a useful tool or app but to access their money by charging a hide or camouflaged subscription in a free-trial mostly-weekly with no option to access the app if you don’t activate the subscription. These apps have 2k or 3k reviews mostly of 5 stars, but if you will order the reviews by recent, you will see that they only want your money. Mobile app developer Kosta Eleftheriou has taken to Twitter to highlight that the problem remains as big as ever in at least some app categories, you can check here. This kind of apps are making thousands of dollars every day, by misleading, cheating Apple users.

The question is did Apple know about these apps?

As a developer I can assure you, it’s very easy to find these apps on App Store even ordinary users can detect these apps. Imagine Apple with its own ecosystem that knows everything about every developer and their apps. So why then Apple doesn’t remove these apps from App Store or remove their fraudulent developer’s accounts? I would like to know this too, maybe it’s because they have 15–30% from every in-app, I think we will never get the answer to this question. The worst part is that a normal hard-working developer who dedicates all his energy and time to make a great product that can help users with their problems and trying to make it the most transparent as possible will never get discovered by Apple users because the top apps in search are the money needed fraudulent ones.

I hope that one time the App Store will be the place that they are telling us it is.

Thank you.