Perhaps app stores exist less to improve the lives of consumers and more for OS companies to get a percentage of all software sales on their platform.

That doesn't hold as much water when you take into account how much curation goes on with the app store.

This comment is breaking my brain.

If 100% of iOS antivirus apps are fraud, that implies they do nothing (probably because of permissions) and/or there are no viruses on iOS to even find, no? If that's the case, that'd further imply those antivirus apps aren't, themselves, malware. Then... what's the point? Why would they exist as apps (and why would people download them) if they do nothing and gain nothing for the author or the user?

> why would people download them

Because they think they need antivirus, they go searching on the App Store, and because Apple has totally failed in curation in this regard, they find them.

They subsequently don't get a virus, leave a five star review, and recommend it to their friends. See the Simpsons episode about the "anti-tiger rock".

They gain money for the author.

This ^

If it's free it's probably making money from ads, or making money from your information. Or you paid for it and it's doing the above anyways. AV style apps can ask for a lot of permissions without raising as much as an eyebrow because they need them to 'protect' users, which puts them in a nice spot to data mine.

I'm not aware which apps you refer to, or even if they're frauds, but there is a potential use case: scanning documents for e.g. Windows viruses before sending them to other persons.

Memory cleaner 2000!