Oh my god, they don't even bother implementing the app any more...
It reminds me of my first App Store experience. I made an app that was somewhat successful (about 2000€ a month, enough to pay for a students living expenses).
Within short time, a chinese speaking developer cloned it. They copied the icon (slighlty different color), they copied the UI, they even copied all the text in the dialog boxes. They released the app with a slightly different name.
I contacted Apple to complain about the obvious copyright infringement, but they only forwarded my complaint to the developer. Interestingly enough, the developer actually replied to me. They sent an email threating legal action. I asked them to at least change the icon, and they did. But until today, the rest of the cloned app is still on the app store and competes with my app.
It's not comparable to your case, since in my case the competitor wasn't a scammer, just someone with a very lose interpretation of intellectual property.
But it makes me feel that Apple really doesn't give a shit what goes on in their store, as long as they make their 30%. (or 15% from small fish like me now)
Fortunately making an app that does the same thing as an existing app isn't copyright infringement - that would be far worse than the Amazon "one click" patent, as there would only be one company allowed to make a web browser, word processor, spreadsheet, etc.
There is an idea of "business dress", which can also be protected.
That is, you can make a drink that tastes like Coca-Cola, but you should not sell a drink in bottles shaped like Coca-Cola's, with a red label, and imitating the longhand of the name. That is, you should not make something excessively similar to an existing established thing in order to trick customers into buying your thing instead of the established thing.
So can rolling the dice and trying for remedy against a foreign entity already playing unfairly. Relying on copyright protection and courts with revenues this small is a huge gamble.
I suppose you could do a DMCA takedown? but that would really seem like using a morally compromised solution for good, as opposed to the more normal using morally neutral solutions for good.
yes, that is doing it for good, the morally compromised part is that the DMCA is a solution created to allow big content owners to shut down whoever they want without any culpability.
Most often things are morally neutral, and can be used for good or bad, some things are morally bad and it is difficult to use them for morally good things, and some things are morally good and it is difficult to use for morally bad. But most things are morally neutral. I think the DMCA is morally bad, but here he can use it for a moral good. But even when you use a morally bad thing for good it is still slightly bad, as in people could point at his usage here (if he chose to use it) and say "see the DMCA isn't bad" and the benefit for the bad solution his good usage promotes would taint his good usage ever so slightly.
As I tend to be more of a pragmatist I would say use the DMCA takedown if possible, but I can understand someone else feeling that would be bad.
The DMCA was created to allow websites like Youtube to exist without existential threat from rights holders due to users uploading content that they do not hold the rights to.
Your view is Stallman-esque, but the world is not so clear cut in terms of good/evil. At best, I would say the abuse of the DMCA by large entities is an unintended consequence of the existence of the DMCA, and it could be patched up by lawmakers if there weren't already a remedy for DMCA requests made in bad faith.
The problem is that places like Youtube have implemented policies more strict than the DMCA that do enable big content owners to bypass the DMCA process and remove user content without much recourse.
>I would say the abuse of the DMCA by large entities is an unintended consequence of the existence of the DMCA, and it could be patched up by lawmakers if there weren't already a remedy for DMCA requests made in bad faith.
that's sort of a nonsensical statement - it would mean that abuse cannot be patched up if there is a remedy. But how does abuse happen if there is a remedy? Surely the remedy is not very good if it does not stop abuse? But abuse cannot be stopped because there is a remedy.
That's some catch there, that catch-22.
At any rate given that I said most things were neutral and only some things were bad or good I don't know that I am very Stallman-esque - or is it just because I, as many other people, have identified one particular thing as being bad that Stallman also identified as bad. Geez, I don't wanna be like that guy - I guess I should change my viewpoint.
Then again, maybe I'm just John Doe-ish, assuming your average John Doe when told about the abuses of the DMCA thinks - whoa, that's messed up! I wonder why the lawmakers don't do anything to fix it, I bet there's some non-working remedy that prevents it!
In the case of a DMCA notice, the entity making the complaint must make it in good faith and under penalty of perjury.
The target of the complaint can file a counter-notice. That is the remedy that you have if there is a false complaint made against you.
There is no catch-22 here - there is a clear path to follow within the legal system for cases of abuse. Could it be patched up to be better? Sure. But catch-22? There is no rule preventing you from responding to or addressing false complaints. If anything, the catch-22 comes from the sites that benefit from DMCA that don't allow DMCA counter-notices, or even worse that pre-emptively remove user submitted content that it suspects will generate DMCA notices. In that case, your argument skews toward "posted speed limits encourage a system where law enforcement officers set up speed traps" - but would we be better off without speed limits altogether? Or maybe just with some limitations on the problems that arise from them?
The net benefit of DMCA is better than without DMCA. The non-DMCA alternative is that I can go post the text of Harry Potter to Reddit, and J.K. Rowling can sue Reddit for distribution of her (registered) copyrighted material for damages. With DMCA, J.K. Rowling can send a DMCA notice to Reddit, and Reddit can take the post down and offer me the chance to respond that the content is not in violation - but Reddit is not in peril.
I'm not a lawyer, but I took a grad level IP law class as part of my undergrad coursework. I think people like us stand to benefit quite a bit from learning how things work at that level.
> existential threat from rights holders due to users uploading content that they do not hold the rights to
Said threat only comes from big content owners, and they don't even bother to check if they have the rights to the content before issuing a DMCA challenge. A small-fry content owner doesn't have the resources to find copyright infringement, while big content providers simply scrape everything with automation and issue a claim on even the flimsiest match.
At YouTube, big content doesn't even have to do the work, they've pushed the work off to YouTube's content ID system which automatically demonetizes (or, better yet, gives the revenue to the claimant).
> A small-fry content owner doesn't have the resources to find copyright infringement
Again, DMCA works out in favor of the small-fry content owner who more than likely has the resources to find copyright infringement (Google searches are free), but that certainly doesn't have the resources to take every case of copyright violation to court for injunction or other remedy.
Pre-DMCA, if someone posted content that I created to a website, my main recourse would be to ask the website nicely to remove said content and hope they didn't immediately delete my request. I could try to sue the website for violating my copyright by distributing my content without my permission.
Post-DMCA, if someone posts content that I created to a website, I can file an un-ignorable DMCA complaint with the website, and there are defined timelines and processes that must be followed if the website does not want to take on liability for distributing my content.
It's unfortunate that big content owners abuse the system, but it's unfair to say that there are no benefits for small content owners.
I've never heard a small content creator say anything good about the DMCA; all I've heard is big content abusing the system to claim the work of small creators.
Also, the entire premise of your DMCA example for small creators is false and trivializes the difficulty of even finding violations. "Google searches are free"? As if I can spend 5 minutes google "who copied my stuff"?
At that price any copyright lawyer will be happy to deal with the paperwork. You were making 2000/month, so the infringement is taking money away. For a share of that it is easy to register the copyright and then send the proper letters. Probably this will settle out of court where apple pays your lawyer from fund the developer would have got and then removes the app. you get nothing directly from the lawyer except that next months all your sales come back to you since there isn't the competitor.
It is, but the US and the EU legally recognize each other's copyrights. So he can sue the Chinese company in his country, and when they don't show up send Apple a notice to freeze assets related to the company, which just needs a US lawyer. In the end the lawyers win, but it is a straight forward case (assuming all the facts are as given...)
Yes, you likely could threaten Apple with a lawyer.
But based on your comment you likely have never dealt with a lawsuit, especially involving several jurisdictions. And trust me, the lawyer want the same thing as the scammer. Your money!
Maybe it is better to sue Apple instead, for allowing such apps - they claim they have "strict guidelines" and review all apps before accepting them .... If many developers around the world start doing this, it becomes a PR issue and costs them money too in legal fees ... may even force them to fix the issue.
> in no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery
Just because another app works similar to another app does not mean it's infringing.
Just because a video has a similar content ID signature to another video doesn’t mean it’s infringing either. My point is that, for better or for worse, platforms already “do it for you” if you’re a record label—there’s no reason why the App Store couldn’t do something similar for app developers.
YouTube presumably does what they do because they'd otherwise be sued by very large companies with lots of lawyers and money. (Whether or not those suits had any merit, they still take resources and are an effective threat.)
Apple is not in the same position: the businesses who would sue them to try to force them to enforce their copyright are much much smaller than it (and are additionally very reliant on Apple).
The problem as I see it is you have developers that are willing to copy ideas, steal text and other IP. Do you really want to be installing apps from devs that have what appears little moral character? What are they doing with your data once you install the app?
While this is not a country specific issue it would help if Apple allowed its users to block countries they don’t trust to download apps from the start.
>about 2000€ a month, enough to pay for a students living expenses
Just out of pure curiosity, where did you live/study that 2000 Euros are student living expenses?
In my neck of the woods in central-western Europe (Austria), 1000 Euros per month is already really good money for most students and 2000 is what you make as a junior full time employee in a good tech company.
Depends on the city and the student. E.g. Munich is known to be quite expensive. 2000 Euro would probably still be comfortable there, but 1000 Euro would probably require quite some frugality.
At my alma mater (SW Germany) you could live on 450 Euro with the same frugality. OTOH a friend (living in the same dorm!) burned through 2500 Euro a month, that's until his parents started to expect some progress after a few years.
The usual course of action is flat sharing. Rent is then a bit more reasonable. In London you could find rooms from a few hundred quid pcm, then depending on location the sky is the limit. That was the most expensive city in Europe, pre-Brexit.
I lived on student pay alone and used student housing, students today get around 849.79 EUR (before taxes) from the government, it was a bit lower back then (but I don't know about inflation and currency conversion).
Not an 1:1 comparison, but but in Seattle (US) if you could convert your 2000€ a month to the roughly 2400$ US it is you would still have at least one roommate to be able to pay rent.
Different story in the US, as kids tend to leave home often due to a much lower cultural focus on the family. Individualism is obsessed over here.
I think we have two very distinct student lives in mind:
The one I know most students have, is living very frugally, cooking at home, counting every penny to not go into more debt, studying hard to get a head start in life and partying hard on a budget, mostly house parties with booze bought from the supermarket with the occasional club or restaurant outing being a treat.
The other one is the Instagram lifestyle student, travelling to fancy places, practicing expensive sports and hobbies, eating out a lot, going bars and clubbing all the time. That's not your typical student, more like the 1%-er.
Living alone in a non-shared apartment is already a huge luxury for most students unless you come from a well-off family.
1000-2000 a month is hardly “jet setting” and has nothing to do with instagram. We are talking the difference between living in a shared accommodation and maybe having a small apartment, maybe having a used car, etc.
Plenty of students get bankrolled by a combination of scholarships, their parents, and loans, and have for decades. There’s nothing wrong with it (or with going the frugal route either).
Edit:
To live in dorm 25 years ago in a standard Canadian university (for me) it cost $500/month plus another $500 a month in mandatory food card. That’s equivalent to 650 euros. That’s plus utilities, off campus food and drink, computer, recreation, and transportation, probably another 100-150 euros. My family was hardly rich (school teacher and truck driver) and helped out, I worked part time, and took out loans. Things are more expensive now.
As the other comment mentioned, 2k/month is a starter salary in the nordics. It is near instagram-lifestyle money in Portugal, Spain and most of the eastern EU for a young single person.
A student having their own apartment (and a car??) is already a luxury 99% of the world will never experience.
Most students I knew didn’t have their own apartment and car but a few did if they had small children, had social reasons to live alone, or were married (yes some people get pregnant in high school).
They usually had a mix of parental help, loans and part time or coop program work, and scholarships. They weren’t super rich, they were from middle class Canadian families 25 years ago.
I even have a friend going to school today with a rental 5 bedroom house, as single parent raising 2 kids, and having 2 exchange students help out. Between scholarships , loans, and the students from China it covers expenses (well over €2k monthly).
I recognize that is richer than 99% of the world. It’s just my experience.
If you’re coming out of university and making £2k a month that is a bit low.
An MBA graduate makes €90k+ annually in Denmark. This is about the same in other European countries maybe +/- 10k
My point isn’t that some people have it good, it’s that €1-2k a month isn’t exactly glamorous living. The “jet setting” types (I have known a few) are getting an allowance of €3-4k+ monthly.
>My point isn’t that some people have it good, it’s that €1-2k a month isn’t exactly glamorous living.
It isn't glamorous, you're right but I wasn't talking about inequality here, I was saying that very few students in Europe have 2K per month at their disposal.
>If you’re coming out of university and making £2k a month that is a bit low.
AFAIK, 2K Euros per month, after taxes, is your typical starting wage for a full time dev job in a decent company in countries like Germany. To get significantly more than 2K after taxes here as a new grad would put you in the top 10% of devs your age, definitely not the norm in the industry or in Europe.
>An MBA graduate makes €90k+ annually in Denmark.
Do you have a source for this? Because if you do then it would be best for me to give up my dev job in Germany and become an MBA in Denmark. Not /s, but quite serious.
Germany MBAs tend to be a bit lower than average at €65k though I assume that’s due to labor protections etc. I am not an expert in German labor laws just going on information I have researched in the past.
https://www.payscale.com/research/DE/Degree=Master_of_Busine...
Where I studied (france) a 2000€/month would leave me with about 1400€ after discouting housing, 3 meals a day and tuition fees. It's a ginormous amount of money for a student.
Dunno about MBA out of school salaries but in tech in most of europe they are quite a lot lower than €90k. In France it's around 38-45k (pre-tax) depending on location (it can go upwards a bit if you are one of the chosen ones coming out of top universities)
Tuition in France is relatively low if you’re native, (which is one awesome feature of the French state)... if you’re an international student it’s a lot more, and other countries also are a lot more.
University of Cambridge in the UK for example estimates on their webpage £22k tuition for an undergraduate arts degree (double for medicine!) and £11k living expenses annually. With GBP/WUR exchange rate that’s €1550 on living expenses alone, and not “glam”.
INSEAD costs in France is almost double in living costs in Fontainebleau , and 3x in tuition... now admittedly a far more exclusive graduate school, but I have acquaintances in Canada that weren’t rich but really good students that got in and took out loans... the point is more about the living expense estimates :
For locals i am sure tuition is far lower but if you’re living away from home the living estimates above don’t seem too far off what I’ve seen.. though I’m sure many can scrape by on less.
I wasn’t French when I studied here. The tuition was still pretty low, roughly 800€ year including insurance afaik my school did not distinguish between local and foreign students. More known schools like ISEN or EPITA took roughly 5k€/year afaik but I may be wrong.
Granted, I didn’t go to a prestigious grande école, rather just a “pretty good” engineering school. Also business schools are indeed more expensive than technical degrees. Not to mention that Paris region is way more expensive than the rest of the country.
You can’t compare Canada to most of Europe. Cars are ridiculously cheap in the US and CA, but a luxury in EU capitals. Parking alone would cost hundreds/month, and expecting that mythical student’s apartment to have a garage is a funny joke!
For someone earning half a million, 2k may not seem much, but there goes your reality check. See the other response to your comment - living on €600/month is the more common student experience, maybe even above median.
Average income in the EU is somewhere around 30-40k/year, most parents will never ever have close to 2k/month per child. Even in expensive cities, most will live in shared student accommodation which is cheaper (200-300). This is what allows almost anyone to enjoy the cheap higher education, if it required even 1k spare income you would exclude the majority of the population.
I had mentioned that a car is needed in some cases, but not all. If I have small kids as a student I’m probably going to need a car in Canada, US, or some EU countries (not all).
Overall I’m also going by what many EU schools say are average expected living expenses for an international student. Invariably it’s a lot more than €600 a month.
I’m not denying folks can go to school on the cheap, I’m just saying that if you think €1-2k a month is ridiculous jet setting luxury, you’re wrong.
That’s total compensation including stocks and bonuses, and still way beyond the median dev salary. Levels.FYI caters to a niche audience. Sort it by lowest to get a much more realistic picture.
> The other one is the Instagram lifestyle student, travelling to fancy places, practicing expensive sports and hobbies, eating out a lot, going bars and clubbing all the time.
This idea that €2000 a month to live and study and pay for materials is some sort of "Instagram lifestyle" is ridiculous.
Not sure about these extremes. I was a working class student in the UK and most of my fellow students still managed to party pretty hard, just efficiently (Sainsbury's Basics Vodka + Blue Bolt, M-Cat, drink deals at the SU and other horrific student nights).
Assuming this is after taxes? As a PhD student in Germany my monthly net salary oscilated roughly between 1100€ at its lowest and 1600€ at its highest. That was enough for me not to need any roomates and even save a bit for a yearly vacation.
Wow something similar happened to my business. A fly-by-night business launched under my trademark, bought Google search ads against my domain searches, copied verbatim content from my website including my terms of service which has my address and company name in it, and then also sent me a cease an desist on my own trademark to top it off. Despite such egregious infractions it's incredibly difficult to stop them because their costs for doing this is near nothing. Their risks for doing this are also near nothing (since there's not really any criminal liability). Unfortunately the US legal system doesn't really work that well for small players. If anything platforms are probably in a better position to enforce things better than the government, but they aren't really doing so. Amazon is also turning a blind eye to scams since at the end of the day all money still flows to them.
Not sure if these things can be permanently stopped as in this example the scam didn't even bother to implement a full app. Anyone can just launch something over the internet these days with just a .com domain.
No, and that's where/why the whole "service provider" thing can get interesting. In this case Apple just hands your DMCA notice to the alleged infringer.
Apple is hosting user created content though (in the form of apps). Don't they become liable for that hosting if they don't handle the DMCA request themselves?
Yes, in this case Apple would be the recipient. And even though they did not create the infringing app, the DMCA take-down forces them to block access to it.
In effect, you'd be triggering the same sequence that led to youtube-dl being blocked on GitHub for a while. Surely, GitHub = Microsoft didn't build it, but they still had to block access when the RIAA sent a DMCA.
In the youtube-dl case, the DMCA notice was later found to be fraudulent and thus the access was restored. But if the infringing app re-uses images verbatim, that won't happen so it stays offline.
[Posting here on the assumption the parent comment will likely stay at the top]
What about... a service, that helps walk you through these kinds of situations, handles country-specific implementation details, can help figure out the best approach for a given scenario, and give you the best chance of getting things sorted out...
...and...
...is NOT a "welcome, welcome, one and all" type of environment, and requires Twitter, GitHub, an HN profile, proof of long-term domain registration (eg, Internet Archive history) - the kinds of things that would be infuriatingly difficult for a scammer to successfully clone?
HN is absolutely big enough that "the HN crowd" would use something like this.
In fact, a service like this could theoretically develop working relationships with contacts inside Apple and Google, build a history/reputation of forwarding accurate, high-signal issues, and maybe help to mitigate the current mess of "problem must attract 10K views to be fixed".
It would depend what they get out of it. It wouldn't have to be called a union. A certificate, code of conduct kind of thing would already be interesting.
Hmmm. What about the second aspect of the GP though? A union is the epitomization of welcome-all/accept-all. I'm imagining something that imposes restrictions on who can apply for assistance, both to ratelimit overall demand and also to make it incredibly hard for scammers to get anywhere.
On the surface (ie, legally speaking), it would absolutely be an exclusive environment. The idea (and probably secret sauce) would be figuring out how to delineate between scammers and legitimate devs.
This is the case with pretty much every Marketplace out there. Same thing happens with Amazon and same thing happens with Airbnb as well.
What a Marketplace cares the most about is maximizing transactions. Hence, they care about having plenty of vendors and showing good reviews for those vendors so that people will buy. They really don’t want to police vendors too much because that means reducing offer and transactions.
It's not illegal to create an app that does the same thing as another app. Method of operation is explicitly not protected by copyright. Copying your icons and text could very well be illegal.
Still, threatening legal action against the people they plagiarized? The audacity of this chinese...
Its a very difficult situation. However the issue is if Apple takes a view, they open themselves up to legal risk - they are not the court so its not their place to determine copyright infrigement. Rather, if you get a court order stating infringement, then Apple has to take down the offending app.
Whilst yours may be a clear cut case, it is not too difficult to think of examples where it is not copyright infringement or is very difficult to prove - is Signal an infrigement of Whatsapp?
I don't think Apple could have done anything differently, to some extent it is your word vs. theirs and the right medium to settle the dispute is the legal system, not Apple.
One of the reasons I like to open-source my work (even in “source-available” form), is so that there is clear “prior art.”
However, I have yet to write an app that has been highly successful, so being copied has not been a problem for me.
Seeing the behavior of these scammers, I have no doubt that they would gleefully take my source, tweak the storyboard, and release a clone. They don’t seem to have any sense of shame, at all. Some of these shops have stables of hundreds of apps; each, a minor tweak of other apps in their roster.
It is annoying that Apple gives me a hard time for some small cosmetic detail on my app, while rubberstamping these tsunamis of pure, shameless garbage.
I do get annoyed by “looks like” scams. A couple of years ago, my wife accidentally purchased a “looks like” app that was basically a screengrab of another app (and was approved on the App Store!).
She was able to get the subscription (!) canceled, but it was a pain. Apple also left the junk app on the store.
She was also so unnerved by the situation, that she never got the original app, so it shows that these spam/scam apps can cause a lot of collateral damage.
Out of curiosity, how do you handle the "source-available" scenario?
Also... I just realized... in the same way the article OP mentioned they were ahead of everyone else wrt features/implementation etc, I wonder if the scammers are ahead of the game in terms of preternaturally staying under the App/Play Store radars? Like, specifically, exactly what might they be doing, I wonder?
I just publish it on GH, without a distribution license[0].
These folks are experts. They probably know exactly what terminology to use, which screens to optimize, etc. Just because they are scammers, doesn't mean they are stupid.
They could probably actually make legit money, giving classes on the Apple App Store process.
Huh, interesting. I was imagining GH would be the worst place to put code considering the existence of immoral vacuum cleaners, but the platform is such a firehose, and the apps you're publishing sufficiently domain-specific, that it seems to work. Interesting.
And yeah, wow, the scammers could give classes... with the only irony that the once out of the "game", as it were, an individual ex-player's info will literally become outdated within 30 seconds :/ - or at least that's the impression I get.
It wouldn’t be too difficult to publish it as a zip file on one of my sites; but no need (at present). GH is quite convenient. I do believe in open source, but I don’t really care too much about Free Software.
Yeah, the Apple app provisioning system changes so much, and so quickly, that you blink; you miss it.
The app could very well be developed before and you stole it from their version control, or copied ideas the posted in their blogs, or copied from their betas.
Or theirs could be available in another store, and you copied theirs from there.
You post screenshots of your app in progress for feedback. Scammer dupes those, rushes app into store, and when you finally launch, they "were there first" and requests your deletion on those grounds.
So, I suspect Apple just wants to stay out of it, let courts decide based on a collection of evidence (and whomever has the money to pay for lawyers, and time to do all the proceedings), and profit no matter who wins.
> You post screenshots of your app in progress for feedback. Scammer dupes those, rushes app into store, and when you finally launch, they "were there first" and requests your deletion on those grounds.
I seriously doubt this has ever happened in the history of the App Store.
Scammers are "lazy". The look for the easy targets. Copying an existing app is easier and more lucrative than trying to write a new app based just on some in-progress screenshots, as if scammers would even be paying attention to you before you published an app.
>I seriously doubt this has ever happened in the history of the App Store.
Don't know about the App Store, but people have copied in-progress websites and did copy-cat products (sometimes complete with the original artwork/styles).
In general, scammers want to know that something is popular, before they decide to clone it?
I wonder if they had bought website visit statistics via e.g. Alexa? And in the app store, they'll see how many downloads? ratings? already existing apps have, and can decide, based on that?
Meaning, "who was first" can work fine, most of the time?
> "theirs could be available in another store, and you copied theirs from there"
And one would need to check different app stores, e.g. who was first in any of Google Play and Apple's App Store?
1. Register your videos and images with the USCO. It'll cost <$100.
2. You can now file DMCA takedowns. Send one to Apple with the USCO registration ID and a copy of the image and a link to the app in question.
3. Apple will either immediately remove that fake app, or be liable for up to $350k in punitive damages for wilful infringement and lose all DMCA protection.
4. If Apple didn't react a week later, approach a lawyer. They'll likely be willing to work purely for 50% commission, because it'll be a slam dunk in court.
5. Repeat the same with Facebook / Youtube if they advertise there with your images or videos. Take Screenshots and write down the url and date and time.
Of course, one would hope that Apple will do the right thing, but it's also reasonably easy to force their hand.
That said, I don't know anyone for whom app development worked out financially if you fairly price your own labor. So maybe just stay away from cheap apps in general.
Some people want to create great, useful apps. That's what they want to do. They are willing to give away half of their earnings to different 3rd parties to just not deal with the bullshit. It's unlikely to be their full time job. They probably don't make that much money on it, cloning happens just when the app begins to make any reasonable profit.
So dealing with all your described is just not practical. Time is valuable. If somebody is creative and wants to provide some value, fighting with the system, preparing some documents, registrations hiring lawyers etc. is the last thing they want to and likely would rather abandon the project instead. Life is too short to deal with the bullshit.
Not to mention that even if what you said is very reasonable most developers will have no idea. It's scammers (efficient ones) that have to know something about copyright law, DMCAs and so on.
Problem is not that easy to solve. App stores can't spend too many hours on each app because there's tons of them, and if they would only invest time in helping those apps that provide enough profit to be worth it, that would create inequality and also many outrages over inevitable false positives.
That said there are of course many many things Apple could be doing better, especially given their fees. Also I wish subscription based model would just die. Should only be for cloud based services and wherever possible those should be optional. Or at least as simple thing as automatically not paying for months when you didn't open the app (with very few exceptions like storage services etc).
Btw, we should have some attribute for web that marks link as scam/negative. These tweets and HN homepage just made those scam apps easier to find.
> App stores can't spend too many hours on each app because there's tons of them,
In this specific case it seems they didn't even spend one minute, since the app is not working.
If at Apple they don't have the resource to at least try to open every app (I doubt it, they are swimming in cash), they could at least find a way to decide which apps to test first, like complaints from other developers, reviews telling that the app is a scam etc.
They do, but in these cases the binary never changed. A value returned to it from a web API changed, or a date passed, or the users are outside of Cupertino, etc.
When I first published my app, they asked for a video of video fully working. Then once I had a bug and they sent me a video of it with the steps to the bug.
So there are definitely people opening and testing apps
Given the up-and-down, seemingly always controversial (and sometimes adversarial nature) of how Apple performs their app reviews and enforces their rules, I think it's 50% on lazy/bad reviewers and 50% poorly-communicated rules and regulations.
I wonder if there are a load of failed submissions too. They'd want to minimise effort so I guess they'd have good ways to quickly rebranding an app as a new one.
Or the app talks to a remote server so it works normally during the review period, but after the app gets approved the author changes a flag on the server and the app changes to "scam mode".
And this is another example of why Apple is too focused on short-term profit over long-term user experience. I think we all know that the app reviewer's top priority is making sure the monetization strategies in the app are "compliant".
Whether it works or not probably won't get you fired as an app reviewer. But miss some IAP workaround that an app is using and I'd bet it could be your job.
You’re exactly correct and is why Apple should be taking action on this problem — it’s in their long-term self interest to do so.
Having customers distrust their App Store is really bad for them in the long run, and would be a competitive advantage over Google if their store was less crammed with garbage.
As it stands now, I usually find apps by looking for solid reviews outside of the App Store app, and am very wary about purchasing anything.
I fully agree, except for the subscriptions. I'd say subscription and in-app purchase are the only ways that building apps can be financially viable. A one-time $1 per user is just too little. But at $10+ you'll be crushed by low cost competition. So I believe it is generally impossible to fund high quality apps with a one time purchase on the app store.
But what's the solution against copycats? I believe we should hold app stores responsible for counterfeit goods, the same way we'd punish Walmart for selling Chinese fakes. But then again, we kind of stopped enforcing that rule, too, as you can see with Amazon.
So effectively, the US has become the wild west for counterfeit products and copyright infringing apps.. Except, of course, if you're the movie industry.
Why would a developer be happy to pay 30% to a publisher for publishing, etc, and maybe pay an artist for assets, but not pay a lawyer for legal?
It's cost of doing business. The only reason they wouldn't would be if Apple already sucked them dry with their monopoly rent.
>Some people want to create great, useful apps. That's what they want to do. They are willing to give away half of their earnings to different 3rd parties to just not deal with the bullshit. It's unlikely to be their full time job. They probably don't make that much money on it, cloning happens just when the app begins to make any reasonable profit.
So dealing with all your described is just not practical.
Well, sucks to be them, then, since that's the reality.
Very much indeed. But this reality is created by ecosystem of our society. If you suppress highly creative individuals who don't want to deal with BS, it's gonna suck for you too. We live in a highly connected world. Changes take years, but even from purely egoistic point of view, to say that suffering of a group of people does not affect you is plain wrong if you think about it long enough.
What do you care about people in North Korea? If the country was doing well, maybe they would have the biggest semiconductor fab. Or maybe you would be using some great open source that came from there.
I agree that there is no point shouting at the clouds when there is no action that you can take to fix the problem. But in some cases you can take some action, even if it's as little as discussing the issue here which makes it slightly louder which could fix the problem, or deciding that you don't want to use Apple because of it etc.
Personally I keep thinking about decentralized web of trust which could make app stores deprecated or at least create a market of app stores. http://comboy.pl/wot.html - I'm working on a better version and a github repo.
And yes, impact of your actions, unless they are really great, is likely very small, so you can just be completely egoistic and world won't be much different. But this works on all scales. If you are not trying to make people around you happy then you live surrounded by unhappy people. So I guess what I'm suggesting, is that this approach will not make you happy, and I'd like you to be. And while internet stranger words have low value for you, it's an input that may affect later output.
You may not necessarily be optimizing for happiness, but if your utility function is not aligning with the most popular one in this case (people seem to want great work to be well rewarded), it would be nice to give us a glimpse of it, to put your statement in a context which makes sense.
Yes, Apple can take the offending app down upon receiving a DMCA takedown. Then the offender can, depending on how profitable the app is, send in a counter-DMCA notice, forcing Apple to put the app back up in two weeks and now Apple is off the hook for infringing, and they're back to making money. Your only recourse is to sue to offending party (not Apple).
> If Apple didn't react a week later, approach a lawyer. They'll likely be willing to work purely for 50% commission, because it'll be a slam dunk in court.
First of all nothing is a slam dunk in court.
Second even if you win you still have to collect and that assumes no delays and no appeals and no feet dragging.
Third it's not like you file and the court says 'oh we can fit you in next Tuesday' (sorry for the tone of that btw but I am trying to make a point).
Fourth, go try and actually find a lawyer that is willing to take such a small case. (ie 'up to $350k' is exactly that. Any opponent would settle for vastly less money. If not they just drag things on.).
> Of course, one would hope that Apple will do the right thing, but it's also reasonably easy to force their hand.
Apple also has a motivation to not create a precedent by settling a case that might just insure future cases against them.
Not saying impossible. But all of this assumes even there is a case and not some legal carve out for Apple (or whoever you are suing) or leg to stand on.
Yes. But you might have to pay extra for them to snail-mail you the certificate.
There are also services that'll do everything for you and you just get a PDF when it's done. Usually costs about $50 in addition to the USCO filing fees.
Even as a "nonresident alien" (meaning foreigner) you can use the USCO website and send DMCA takedowns.
But of course, it only works if you send the DMCA to a company that needs to adhere to US law. So it'll work to get Apple or Google to remove the infringing app, but you probably cannot use DMCA to directly pursue the infringers.
What if you hire a US lawyer? You're still not in the US, but I would assume that Apple is still required to follow US law, regardless of where you happen to be.
It tests every app, including this one. Think about what really happened here.
Edit: Apparently my downvoters can’t think about what really happened here so I’ll explain it.
In App Review this app worked fine. Oh, the keyboard was likely lame and not useful, but the scam screens were no where to be seen. Then the app is approved and placed on the store. Now the scam screens appear.
It’s trivial to do, is done all the time even by legitimate developers, and incredibly hard for Apple review to detect.
> Then the app is approved and placed on the store. Now the scam screens appear.
This means there's some switch built into the code that changes its behavior, either after a certain date, or on certain known IPs that Apple tests on, or after a certain URL changes value.
At this point, the complaints pour in. People ask for refunds and claim it's not as advertised. The $400 subscription fee has to be mentioned in some complaint.
And at this point, Apple falls flat on its face. It does not investigate any of these serious complaints, which are easily validated.
Apple is one of the most profitable companies in the world. If they can't afford to do the right thing, they shouldn't run this fake "walled garden" app store. If 30% of my app dollar goes to them, an app that doesn't try to steal hundreds of dollars from me is a very very reasonable expectation.
Apple gets thousands of complaints a day. They have to do a detailed investigation or they’ll risk pulling legitimate apps. The apps can also be geofenced so the behavior doesn’t occur in Cupertino.
Just because Apple doesn’t immediately remove a scam doesn’t mean they aren’t working to remove it.
So hire more people to get through the backlog faster. These are problems money can solve and Apple has plenty. (Disclaimer: I’m an Apple fanboy, use their products almost exclusively, but I still think it’s ridiculous all the shit apps that get through)
I wonder if it is trivially hard to detect or not.
For example, if the app reviewer’s touch interaction with an app were recorded and the resulting screens diffed with the same pattern after publishing, there should be no changes.
This is a method used as part of some UI testing with selenium.
There could be apps this does not work for, such as when content changes or conversion type UI is shown.
But I imagine there is some amount of low hanging fruit here. And even that once a “scam” app like this one is reported, Apple should want to review past diffs to look for the example of the violation.
I also agree that for the price, this is what apple should be preventing on behalf honest developers
It is also worth noting that DMCA is embraced ITT whereas with Github’s response to DMCA recently it did not get the same treatment.
> For example, if the app reviewer’s touch interaction with an app were recorded and the resulting screens diffed with the same pattern after publishing, there should be no changes.
There are lots of valid reasons for apps to change based on outside events (location, time, online content). For example apps displaying weather forecast or current news.
I think there is a solution and Apple should implement it. But even code we know how to write doesn’t appear overnight, doesn’t work perfectly, and doesn’t suffer from high levels of false positives.
It's just bike-shedding. Enforcing names or the fact that you mention subscribing to the app on a website is easy whereas testing every app that comes in is hard.
Apple advertises the benefit of its App Store that thanks to the diligent manual review, such fraud simply has no place there. They also maintain that the fees are high because the review process is top notch and thus expensive.
Now they have to admit that either the walls in their garden are worse than Swiss cheese by letting bad actors in, or that they are complicit in that fraud, because someone had to approve that shit.
Now if I’m just as likely to be screwed over by an Apple-approved app from their walled garden as I am by sideloading random crap, what’s the point in it for me, as a user? If I have to exercise just as much caution, I can just as well sideload what I want.
> Now if I’m just as likely to be screwed over by an Apple-approved app from their walled garden as I am by sideloading random crap, what’s the point in it for me, as a user? If I have to exercise just as much caution, I can just as well sideload what I want.
If this were true, then sure.
But it obviously isn’t.
Even the Google Play store is way worse in terms of risks than the App Store.
Which is actually better, because I and an average Joe D. User at least _expect_ shady apps to be abundant there, despite all Google's efforts to prove otherwise. We exercise care there because we know for a fact Google's approval system is half-automated and full of holes.
On the other hand, the rhetoric Apple's marketing employs all the time suggests the App Store is the Internet Safety Panacea, a risk-free Teletubbyland for everyone. Which is far worse because it entices you to assume it's totally safe and let your guard down.
Clearly false based on the observed incidence of malware, botnets, and fraud on Android. People in fact are not able to avoid these things.
You are not comparable to “Joe D user” if you know how to protect yourself against these things. He does not.
It actually is safe for most people to let their guard down with Apple’s store. A few counter examples show that it’s a moving target to keep it safe, but nothing more.
Well, they can always take their business elsewhere, where the grass is greener. But they came to the App Store because it's a dozens of billions of dollars a year market...
This sounds almost like the developers should be permanent, pardon my French, bitches to both Apple who can boot them for any petty reason, and to scammers who copycat them and make money with straightaway fraud, then to Apple again, who won't do anything about the scammers (I wonder what percentage of App Store revenue comes from those, once you look past the biggest players like Microsoft/Adobe/whoever else is in the top 20), and then to Apple again, who will incorporate your app's functionality into the core of their OS offering and then boast how they were the first to come up with the idea.
And not only should be the developers bitches, they should, according to you, accept and enjoy this dubious "honor".
You can build an app that only serves an extremely narrow market niche to improve functionality that is incredibly important to the platform owner, but then you shouldn’t complain about being sherlocked or how tough competition is.
At least I don't need to pay 99 USD a year for some "review" that clearly only works in favor of Apple (they mostly seems to approve anything from smaller developers like shown in this post, while using draconian and arbitrary rules for competitor apps like Spotify).
Periodically testing apps to see they haven't become a scam.
Apple takes 30% - one dollar in three goes to them, and the remaining 2 has to go to writing and testing software, design, customer support, advertising.
It's ridiculous that so many people think Apple can just take this huge cut and then allow people to be literally robbed by scam apps and just shrug.
It’s ridiculous that you don’t think a good portion if that 30% doesn’t go to writing and testing software, design, customer support, advertising, not to forget hosting, developer services, localization, etc.
Apple should figure out a better automated solution for this specific problem, but it’s ignorant to not acknowledge they already do far more than other app stores.
> It’s ridiculous that you don’t think a good portion if that 30% doesn’t go to writing and testing software, design, customer support, advertising, not to forget hosting, developer services, localization, etc.
Google manages all of that with a measly one time $25 developer fee. Clearly $99 of recurring developer charges is the bigger scam here.
But some won't. And if people get used to it, they will go elsewhere for a specific app and leave the scams behind.
People be forced will go to really shitty stores that are way worse than Apple’s one for specific apps, and the overall app market will become much less safe.
Why? Because people establishing new stores will just pay for exclusives.
It’s extremely difficult for Apple to stop apps from behaving differently during review than they do when downloaded from the App Store. A large number of developers implement schemes like this, and most aren’t scammers.
Even if Apple has reviewers download the approved app from the store to double check it hadn’t changed behavior, they can be gamed. Remember the Uber App Review geofencing that went on for years?
Apple users will defend its behavior to the bitter. No matter what you post about Apple, it will either be excused or praised.
Does anybody know of a firefox addon or monkeyscript to filter articles on Hackernews? At this point I just want to hide any article with "M1" or "Apple" in it.
There's a guy who made a script that downvotes any comment that starts with "I mean" or ends with "so..." I wonder if he's worked something up like this.
Apparently the paid for 5 stars comments have been deleted, all that's left are comments in the 1 star range but the app is still rated 4.1/5. It's not the first time I see this discrepancy and makes it very hard for a user to understand who to believe: the 1 star comments or the very positive rating average?
The "more by this developer" app list is also telling. A bunch of utilities, with all of them having in-app purchases, most having weekly subscriptions too. I don't understand how any of these apps passed the review.
It's not obvious at all that one piece of information is completely wrong and another, much more difficult to consume piece of information, is accurate.
A scammy subscription of $400+ a year?! And this gets to the top of the charts because Apple makes more money from it!
These are the instances where the 30% commission (or even the recently announced 15% commission for those earning less than $1M in revenue a year) seems like extortion. Apple really needs to step up on app reviews in terms of false positives (banning legitimate apps for frivolous reasons and reinstating them after social media uproar) and false negatives (allowing scam apps and clones to thrive while hurting the original apps).
Hopefully the threats of regulation can’t manifest soon enough for this to get better for the developers and the users. On one side of the equation you have the developers and users for whom the App Store ecosystem is getting toxic. On the other side of the equation you have two parties making a lot of money for low effort — the crooks and Apple. This is not a good look, Tim Apple and Apple.
(I don’t even want to get into how much worse the Play Store is since it’s a digression from the topic)
One thing I'd like to see instituted is more extensive review for apps with purchases/subscriptions over a certain value. "If you wanna charge more than $100/year, we're gonna vet it more carefully".
That makes sense. But there would have to be much lower limits even on a weekly and monthly basis. How much lower is a bit subjective (even what seems like a small amount to one person may be a big amount for another). From reviews I’ve seen for some apps, it seems like users don’t even know how to approach Apple for refunds when the app is scammy or doesn’t work as promised. This latter part should also be made easier. All this will require additional staff, which Apple can surely afford without having a big dent in its margins.
An app that does nothing passed review? I hope this doesn't happen often, and that the processes are reviewed. May be reviewers have too much work to do and just click OK sometimes to move on?
Also, I understand that the App store has a million apps, and they can't be super thorough with all of them.
What I don't understand is how an app that is actually getting a lot of downloads and reviews, and that charges a huge ammount of money, and that is promoted very up in search, doesn't make it to the top of the "let's really review this" priority list.
> As to the point of whether review matters, can you imagine the dreck the store would be filled with without review?
Anecdotally—and this has been true for multiple years—none of the apps I use were discovered via the App Store, I always found them somewhere else. The App Store is already filled with garbage, and searching is both broken[1] and can be manipulated[2].
App review seems to be useless in every single way[3], stops developers from making quick fixes, and arbitrarily stops people from installing apps they may want.
[1]: Last time I tried searching for “pinboard” (a bookmarking service), I had scroll past twenty pinball apps before reaching the first relevant app.
[2]: Apps buying the name of their competitors as search terms for themselves.
I mean the app store is filled with garbage already because review, much like DRM, only solves a few surface problems while punishing good-actors more than clever bad-actors.
Geofencing seems easy enough to spoof if you're Apple and have internal tools down to the hardware. Not to mention, Apple is global business.
The issue of only working during review is solved by doing a two-pronged approach, testing pre-production and proactively testing the released applications after publication. They obviously have manual ways of revoking apps.
> Apps can behave differently based on a flag set in the cloud, that’s only triggered after approval.
But if this do-nothing app _did_ do something in the review phase, then why switch that functionality off afterwards? If you've already gone to the trouble of writing (or stealing) code to do _something,_ at least enough not to be refused entry into the App Store with a "does nothing at all" verdict, then your scam will only be hurt by switching even that minimal functionality off: Users will just quit using it all the faster. You'd use your remote switch to activate the scamming bits, not to de-activate the rest.
So I don't believe that's how this particular app under discussion got through. It can't have actually done anything useful in the review phase either.
Because the scammed version is way more profitable? They can code up some buttons in a layout roughly resembling a keyboard that insert the character when clicked on in like 15 minutes which will probably pass review. The "keyboard" of course will be unusable for practical purpose.
If the "keyboard" wasn't usable for practical purposes then why did it pass review? A stronger review process could refuse such apps.
And if the "keyboard" was usable for practical purposes then why would the scammer waste the chance to monetize those practical, working features which they sunk their own time developing?
It’s not the reviewers job to decide if you created a “good” keyboard, just that your app generally does what it says it does.
Doing specific feature testing would not be trivial. Your description may say you have the worlds only AI keyboard driven by machine learning. No way the reviewers will be able to test that, so they will accept it at face value.
A few years ago Apple substantially decreased the App Review time, in direct response to developer complaints. It went from a week to a day. Part of the reduction was the use of more automated tools to detect violations. Some of it was adding more resources.
But that means reviewers only have minutes to review each app, not hours. And they are focused on technical rules violations. They aren’t ever going to build a test plan based on marketing claims to verify every single one.
I don't think it's necessary to do specific feature testing or verify marketing claims to solve this particular issue.
For example, whether or not the app is lying in its description about using AI techniques is irrelevant. Even if it were lying about using AI techniques, it still might be a useful and functional keyboard app. And even if it really did use AI techniques, it still might be a useless impractical app.
> It’s not the reviewers job to decide if you created a “good” keyboard
Don't the app store guidelines say that the app needs to deliver a "great" experience?
> But that means reviewers only have minutes to review each app, not hours.
To me, that eliminates a big part of the value proposition of having a "highly curated" app store.
> It’s not the reviewers job to decide if you created a “good” keyboard, just that your app generally does what it says it does.
From KeyboardCleanTool’s webpage[1]:
> In 2011 Apple rejected the app for the Mac App Store because apparently it's "not useful", however I often use it to clean my Macbook Keyboard without producing annoying input.
App review does make judgements on the usefulness of apps (and in this case they are wrong, because plenty of people use that app).
It’s trivial to create an app to pass review and turns into a scam. Far harder to create an actually good and useful app.
On this example, it could have gone like this. They create a simple keypad on the watch, and some subscription screens. The app reviewer verified that there is a keypad on the watch, that the screens language and subscription process is reasonable and approves.
Then when the app appears on the store, now it works entirely differently and all the user sees are the scam screens.
It's funny that these scam apps and fake reviews can exist in the app store en masse, while everyone on forums like this one will praise Apple for every heavy-handed decision against legitimate apps (which coincidentally were all in Apple's own interests) because hey the walled garden keeps us safe.
from a user experience point of view it doesnt really matter how much of a distribution platform is compromised, if you reach a tipping point where it become useless.
The only real way to use apps stores these days is to have prior knowledge something is legit
I think it's time for freelance developers to behave like companies. Write big tech support once, wait a week and if the issue isn't solved, contact a lawyer and let them handle it. Otherwise you will be eternally bouncing around customer support departments until you write a tweet in the hope of getting noticed by somebody afraid of a PR disaster.
> it's time for freelance developers to behave like companies
How about: it's time for freelance developers to unionise? Some organisation (self-regulating to represent only legit developers) that can put pressure on Apple, run PR, help with legal, etc. (Maybe funded by 5% of the 30% -> 15% cut savings).
Maybe the question should be “what freelance developer has the time and energy to try to do the job of a lawyer” whenever they have some legal issues to resolve.
You are either very important or very naive. I was not paid once $8000. As somebody from another country no lawyer company would even reply your email. Took the loss and moved on.
Even with my company I would think long and hard if anything is worth pursuing. The extra time loss required and cost means I would approach legal action in the US only if the amount is huge.
I assume freelance developers are even less willing to deal with this bullshit.
Isn't it just going to end up in arbitration anyways?
I'm a little wary of the viability of suing Apple until they comply. I hope that it works, but the cynic in me says it's far more likely to trigger a ToS update than it is any kind of change.
If you own an Apple Watch, FlickType is a must have. It only works with Messages due to the Apple APIs, but he wasn’t kidding when he said near-iPhone typing speeds.
The irony of the whole thing is that this could cue Apple to “sherlock” it, if it wasn’t on their radar already.
You speak as though app developers are swimming in money, but the fact is that the App Store market is very top heavy. As usual, "the 1%" are doing extremely well, but the vast majority of app developers are not making a lot of money. Apple's recent small business program is tacit acknowledgement from Apple that many developers are struggling financially and cannot afford even the 30% cut.
In comparison, the so-called "gig economy" is also extremely large, perhaps even larger in total dollars than the App Store, but that doesn't mean individual gig workers are doing well.
>You speak as though app developers are swimming in money, but the fact is that the App Store market is very top heavy. As usual, "the 1%" are doing extremely well, but the vast majority of app developers are not making a lot of money.
Society is very "top heavy", the 1% has most of the wealth too, the popular artists is a power-law distribution, and so on. That's not up to the App Store though.
>They build the OS and SDK on Mac too, why do they not get a % cut on all apps there too?
Because they chose not to for business/historical reasons. So?
>Actually when you're in Safari you're using their OS and SDK too why don't they get a % cut of purchases and software there too?
Well, technically you're not using their SDK. Just the OS and the browser engine. The SDK is just the JS runtime.
That said, they could. And people could use another platform.
>Just interested why one scenario is considered the norm yet these two others that fall under the same justification seem absurd.
In the end it's a business decision, with historical (e.g. computers didn't have this model in the past, phones/consoles/etc did), market, and other considerations.
This is a problem that poison every platform these days. Apple Store and Play Store are full of borderline or outright scam apps. Google and Facebook keep pushing literal scam or porn-baiting advertisement[0]. Every search engine is poisoned by those shitty top-X, article spamming, fake news website making searching for an answer to some question a real chore. Amazon is full of fake product and scam. Even Steam is now spammed with shitty game that are sometimes not even playable ...
The current states of the "mainstream" internet just make it way to easy to make money making the cheapest content possible or scam. And the company / individual running those are usually in country that keep them safe from any legal repercussion so they can keep doing it over and over again. While not everything is easily fixable, a lot would be better if Google, Apple, Amazon and co would finally step in and enforce their "quality control", make every app, ads, etc, go through and actual human verification process, but that would hurt there margin and it looks like they have no incentive in doing that. They usually have a monopoly or at least a duopoly, so why would they care about the cesspool that their services have become ? Its not like another company can compete with them.
Want to have a real quality app store ? Its not possible on Apple devices and Google make it as hard as possible. Want to compete with Youtube or Twitch ? Be ready to throw a lot of money to attract customer and creator and still fail (hello Mixer) or become a cesspool either way (hello DailyMotion, rutube, ...).
Sure you can try DMCA take down, copyright infringement lawsuit, ... But it will cost you a lot of time and money, which could have been put in your product, and it will be ultimately useless. By the time the request is processed or the lawsuit takes places, they will have already created 10 more clone, push 100 more scam, and other fun stuff.
"The Law" absolutely runs on "when did this piece of paper arrive at this location". I don't know about DCMA specifically, but yes, most cases where one actor claims another actor is doing something wrong require the reporter to follow specific steps or it's not valid.
This is nonsense. Google cannot simply provide a fake or broken button and get away with it. If Google is required to provide a mechanism for reporting DMCA violations in a timely manner, and they do not, they're going to found liable no matter what kind of excuse they provide.
The reporting buttons in Play make absolutely no claim that it's for DMCA violations. Because it's not for DMCA violations.
DMCA claims go elsewhere, e.g. mailing them a physical letter or going through their separate reporting system for legal violations: https://support.google.com/legal -> https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_dmca?product=goo... . And, honestly, I'd still trust physically mailing them over that form - mailed letters start legal time limits for actions in many (many!) cases, online methods rarely have court-tested equivalent protections.
Apple seems to be far more concerned with getting their (30/15) percent cut than with how that revenue was generated. The App Store is full of such examples. As long as you pay the baron his share and don’t upset him with unwelcome thoughts (Parler) or worldly desires (erotica), you are free to reign.
The IOS app store being full of garbage is why I can't believe people try to use the "A monopoly store is better because it improves the user experience" angle. To me its worse.
What is the worst those scammers have to fear? Having their app banned from the App store? If so, this sounds like a very unethical, but amost risk free business model.
Theoretically, having their Apple-issued dev certificate revoked (IIUC which bans all apps tied to that certificate) and Apple dev account closed.
But I guess these folks have contingencies to create new dev accounts that look unrelated and still come out net positive of the dev account cost quickly.
Creating dev accounts with fraud is super easy. Apple has no way to verify whatever documents they ask for proving your/your company's identity are authentic.
Presumably they already have a solution around that if they're scamming people, or maybe they're in a country where law enforcement is so lacking that this practice is normalized and low-risk, so they can just do this in friends/accomplices' names for a small cut of the profits and not have to worry about concealing their identity from law enforcement.
I assume that the money earned neither goes back to the customer nor to the honest competitors. If I am correct here, Apple would even have a financial incentive that these frauds exist.
I don’t know the details of all of Apple’s refund policies, specifically how far back they go in cases like this. But I can say Apple isn’t worried about taking a loss to ensure their customers get treated fairly.
I had one misaligned UI element And it was rejected. What are apple up to?? Do some reviewers just not care?? And neither does apple about bad reviewers.
That's the IAPs for the scam app. If it wasn't a scam app then £7.99 to unlock all the features might be fine. But £7.99/wk subscription is obviously wildly different, and you wouldn't know that's what's going on from the App Store.
This might be "old man shaking fist at clouds", but was crapware this bad before centralized app stores? I know it was out there - most famously stuffed into SourceForge downloads - but it didn't seem to be as prevalent. Though perhaps it's more a reflection of increased ROI from doing things like this in 2021 vs 2001.
It was even worse back then. At least with the App Store, I can set my parents free on it and they won’t get a keylogger or remote access tool installed unwittingly. Not to mention malware back then slowed the computers down to a crawl and was a pain in the ass if not impossible to remove. Now it’s just holding it and pressing the little x.
I remember that reinstalling Windows was a regular thing to do to get rid of the garbage.
So then the only recourse is for you to produce 10 cloned apps of YOUR own app-each w a different color, font, and language. Well maybe a hundred clones? each for a different geographical location? Since you own all of them, you would swamp out any competition.
Really wish Apple would limit unlocks to no more than the App cost in the store. As in, if the developer wants to sell you $39 dollars of features, game play items, or such, after you obtain the app they are limited per year to the cost of the app from the initial purchase off the store.
The number of apps with obscene monthly and yearly charges that snag people is too numerous to count and Apple doesn't even police this aspect
I'm late to the party. But this seems to be a policy problem, no? There needs to be a real incentive for Apple and other platforms to prevent this scams.
Off the top of my head, I wonder if you couldn't make Apple have to pay a flat fee and all revenue made from the scam to the lawyer proving that this is a scam. That would create a merket for anti-scam lawyers, resulting in quickly hunting down all scammers on the platform.
Oh so i cant actually trust the walles garden apple has curated. Everyone told me that locking my device to the curated app store is for my own safety. Let Apple select the software you can run so that youre safe from scams.
Good to know thats not true. I still have to be vigilant _and_ accept heavy restrictions.
OT: Most (including me) confuse good products with good business models. Only because a product has killer potential doesn't mean it's based on a good business model and checks all boxes such as defensibility, distribution, lock-ins, dependencies, etc.
Lol they having million of reviews rating on app which cost 400$ a year which is $$$ for Apple (they get 30% of that). But Apple wont pay someone for looking through these apps and assure the app at least do something similar to what is advertised.
If they don't take reasonable action on complaints, then yes, of course. Why do you think YouTube etc. are so trigger-happy with DMCA complaints? Exactly to avoid these kind of liability issues.
The obligation is to take reasonable steps to ensure that a platform isn't used for illegal activities. This isn't something you can 100% exclude, of course, and what "reasonable steps" are differ per platform, but in the case of an app store "take action against malicious scam apps when notified of their existence" seems quite reasonable to me.
The only difference is that copyright/DMCA has a huge industry pursuing this, and there is no one with deep pockets and free time pursuing this.
> The obligation is to take reasonable steps to ensure that a platform isn't used for illegal activities.
No, I do not think there is such a general obligation. DMCA is an exception for copyright infringement where the platform is obligated to act pre-emptively. Otherwise Apple is free to wait for a court order before removing anything.
they do in fact financially benefit from any scam transaction that is not reversed, at the rate of 30%.
a profit/benefit is exactly that, regardless of size. just because it's not a major line item does not give us excuse to ignore it.
brand damage, hard to prove. are any of these people leaving the walled garden entirely? if not, there was no damage to the brand and apple profited 30%.
The only reason Apple spends huge sums on app review is because they believe it’s important to maintaining brand value. Do you think they believe so without any substantial marketing research?
It’s easy to blame Apple here and to some degree they are responsible for scammers aren’t banned from the App Store. However, why isn’t somebody complaining who got scammed? Don’t they want $400 back? Maybe they do a simple refund and that’s enough for them but there should be some feedback loop to detect scams quickly before they climb the App Store charts.
> why isn’t somebody complaining who got scammed? Don’t they want $400 back?
Many App Store customers literally do not know that they can request a refund, or how to request one. App Store does not even have a clear refund policy. You see a lot of reviews for scam apps that say "I want a refund!" They just don't know.
App Store customers assume, naturally but unfortunately mistakenly, that app developers have the power to grant refunds. They have no idea Apple itself is the sole source of refunds. You would think that Apple would put a refund link in the ratings/review area of the store, but nope.
As a user, it's not very clear how to complain on the App Store. I did it once and got a refund from Apple, because it was an obvious case. But recently I bought an app that was not obviously problematic: it was meant to do some things, cost a few $, and did indeed do "some" things, however the app actually felt like a tutorial code (maybe even one from Apple) implemented and pushed to the store. Just like that, almost no features, no design or quality. It's difficult to complain, but I clearly couldn't know from the store itself.
> there should be some feedback loop to detect scams quickly before they climb the App Store charts.
Well, that's the thing, isn't it? The app store (any app store) which has a review process and takes a great cut of revenue, should stand for quality and safety. Here, that's clearly not the case.
For another example, see Amazon problems with fake products.
Both Apple and Amazon are large enough and have so much money that you'd think they could spend some of those resources on handling the problem. Perhaps they do, but appears not.
I just have given up on Amazon searching for anything because it's filled with utter shit. Between the fake Chinese shit, the mixed product reviews and the "promoted" crap, Amazon's UX is completely broken and has been for years.
Fuck, if any other company would be able the provide their logistics, I wouldn't drop a dime again with them.
It’s unlikely many users got scammed by this. So most of the few that do are likely complaining and in the ocean of incoming complaints Apple will eventually see this and ban the developers.
I think you're misrepresenting his post. He isn't blaming the victims of being scammed, but wondering why Apple hasn't noticed or taken action after they probably (/hopefully) are getting lots of chargeback and complaints from users buying this broken app.
This guy's business was doomed from the start in more than one way. E.g. nothing would stop Apple from copying the idea in the next version of the watch.
The idea is simply too generic. And it's a feature, not a product.
I agree, many app makers don't seem to realize that any long-term sustainable software needs to be based on deep know-how (or: tons of features and a strong lead), something that cannot be easily copied. Otherwise it will be copied a thousand times anyway. Some of the copy-cats will have strong financial backing, others will be students in a poor country with almost unlimited time and extremely low costs, and yet others will have extreme marketing skills and channels.
That's not to say you cannot make money with trivial ideas. It just seems obvious to me that such apps cannot last very long and you have to go with quantity instead of quality in that case.
Making a keyboard that has the selling point of "being good on the Apple Watch" seems like a fragile business model to begin with, when Apple's goal should be implementing the best possible keyboard. This has struck custom keyboard vendors in the past(e.g. Gboard stealing basically all custom keyboard market share by implementing stand-out features). Please correct me if I'm missing something.
Hope the he can rectify the situation, and in the worst case, possibly rebrand.
A reasonable analogy might be competitive gaming, where the author is trying to be the best of the best and achieve rank 1 on a competitive ladder, but he's losing because the rank 1 player is cheating.
You're suggesting they play a different game because the maker of this game is allowing a cheater to nullify the results of the competitive scene.
Do you see how it might poor form to tell a person trying to be the best in the world at one specific game to simply play a different game?
That's potentially kind of a straw man though. Your suggestion isn't necessarily wrong.
No his point is to stop playing games anyone can play (including the console maker who has a tremendous incentive to be the best at the game), and build a business with a sustainable competitive advantage.
I’ve built an entire business around OS enhancements before, it’s like picking up nickels before a steamroller.
“Tap to "unlock", and you're now 1 step away from confirming a $416/year subscription.”
I would think that “1 step” involves accepting a dialog that shows you this will cost $8 a week.
If so, that doesn’t put Apple off the hook (it certainly is a major change from early App Store, when they removed the “I am Rich” app, which was totally honest in what functionality it provided (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich)), but does move some blame to the user.
As I said, it doesn’t put Apple off the hook. Even if they think selling such apps is a good idea, I think that, for subscriptions, Apple should mention price per year, too (I guess they don’t, but am not willing to try with such an app). That might prevent many users who scan the dialog, see “$8”, find that reasonable for buying a feature, and click “subscribe” from clicking on that button.
It reminds me of my first App Store experience. I made an app that was somewhat successful (about 2000€ a month, enough to pay for a students living expenses).
Within short time, a chinese speaking developer cloned it. They copied the icon (slighlty different color), they copied the UI, they even copied all the text in the dialog boxes. They released the app with a slightly different name.
I contacted Apple to complain about the obvious copyright infringement, but they only forwarded my complaint to the developer. Interestingly enough, the developer actually replied to me. They sent an email threating legal action. I asked them to at least change the icon, and they did. But until today, the rest of the cloned app is still on the app store and competes with my app.
It's not comparable to your case, since in my case the competitor wasn't a scammer, just someone with a very lose interpretation of intellectual property.
But it makes me feel that Apple really doesn't give a shit what goes on in their store, as long as they make their 30%. (or 15% from small fish like me now)