Re:A top-grossing scam on the App Store
by withinboredom on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @05:51PM
(#26799812)
I’d be willing to bet that no one is looking in the top X% of grossing apps for spam/scan. They probably (wrongly) assumed that most people wouldn’t spend money on a scam and most people wouldn’t be fooled, only a small set of people. In fact, I doubt their AI’s training data lacked anything like this.
But isn’t that the primary reason Apple claims to want to maintain the walled garden and build “idiot proof” products - because they realize many people easily get fooled and spend money on scams?
If you're able to share your thoughts without giving away private info from your time there: Based on this particular scam - with so many bad reviews AND the extremely high revenue being generated, should this not have tripped some kind of alarm for closer review?
How has this been going on for so long without anyone at Apple noticing? It's not like it's lost in a sea of minor apps generating middling income, it's literally in the top tenth-of-a-percent by gross revenue.
And I would bet a LOT of money that there are plenty of people at Apple who are well paid to closely watch their top performing apps. So how does this get missed, unless "is this a scam?" just isn't high on the list of priorities for those teams.
I think it's absolutely fair to question Apple's commitment to catching this stuff based on that.
Perhaps they are great at catching all the low-hanging fruit and the obvious stuff, but what if something gets through that first net? Is anyone paying attention then? Or are they just watching the money roll in?