After Apple announced at the recent Worldwide Developers Congress 2017 that it was able to pay developers more than US$70 billion via App Store, experts have come forward to reveal a dissenting truth about the claim. A marketing data firm has found out that fake developers and scammers have secretly been fooling Apple all this time.
Online publishing platform Medium has released a report detailing who Apple is paying with its US$70 billion. Medium's Johnny Lin stresses out in the said report that not all of that huge sum of money in necessarily legitimate as some developers are abusing Apple's in-app purchase feature, as well as the App Store search ads.
In the scenario described, iOS users are enticed to subscribe to illegitimate services such as virus scanners, VPN apps, and password generators, among others. To quantify it, Lin went to the App Store and looked at the Productivity category. He found out some well-known apps from trusted publishers, but as he scrolled down, he started to observe some dubious apps.
To get to know these apps in question, he read all the description down to the bottom where the fine print was revealed. One anti-virus app told him its cost US$99.99 for a seven-day subscription. "Buried on the third line in a paragraph of text in small font, iOS casually tells me that laying my finger on the home button means I agree to start a $100 subscription", writes Lin.
This scenario is only one of the ways crafty developers and scammers syphoned money from the users and Apple. According to marketing data firm Sensor Tower, the bogus app delivers more or less US$80,000 each month in revenue. Search Ads is also one way these deceivers draw off money. Unfortunately, Apple has no filter to sift through search ads as of now.
