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Apple Pulling High-Grossing Scammy Offer Subscription Apps Off the App Store

42 points by wallflower 8y ago

justkez 8y ago
I feel like this has been some months in the making. We have an IAP enabled app (https://www.bestcoffee.guide/app https://www.bestcoffee.guide/app) just turned a year old. When we launched last year we had no issues with our - very clear - subscription page. Subsequent updates, however, have required closer and closer adherence to the specifics of the Apple iap guidelines. All the boiler plate text needed to be displayed, the button needs the price on it, and to be on the same page. Overall a good change for the user but man it makes it hard to design a remotely aesthetic subscription page.
- Endy 8y ago
  As a user, I genuinely don't care about your aesthetic when it comes to your IAPs. I want a clear-as-day notice well in advance that you're asking to take real money for non-physical goods and/or services. If some group is working to make that clearer, I'm in favor.
  - MOARDONGZPLZ 8y ago
    Seconded. I am very careful to make sure that I don't spend money unexpectedly in apps, and it can be pretty difficult. I'm all for any guidelines or regulations that make knowing when I'm going to be charged more explicit.
    - Endy 8y ago
      That's part of why I'd only use gift cards with very restricted budgets on paid software repositories.
    - MiddleEndian 8y ago
      Payments should be client controlled. Rather than you giving online organizations your payment information, they should request payments from you and you could manually approve or reject them. You could give certain trusted organizations you trust an auto accept option (for instance monthly web hosting bills).
  - satysin 8y ago
    Agreed 100%. Hell a white page with generic Times New Roman font and generic buttons is perfect if it tells me how much I will be paying monthly, how long I am committed for and everything else that should be shown to me before I subscribe. If you can make it a little prettier that is fine but I want the cold hard facts over some cute parallax effect when I scroll the page
  - madeofpalk 8y ago
    To be fair, that's _at least_ up to the OS, and iOS does do this. Every in app purchase has to be approved from an OS-provided dialogue that requires hardware interaction to approve. One problem I have seen from this was an ancestry app that prompted you to scan your fingerprint to "find your relatives", and then would prompt for IAP, which asks for Touch ID approval. Because you already had your thumb on the reader, it would more or less instantly be approved. Unsure if Apple has made any changes around this yet. https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/9bxw0f/this_ancestry_app_attempts_to_make_you_use_your/ https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/9bxw0f/this_ancestr...
    - wool_gather 8y ago
      Apps don't have access to the actual fingerprint data, though. Presumably they were just using it as a login guard?
      - jboles 8y ago
        The issue is not the app getting the fingerprint data, but rather literally baiting your finger onto the reader and then switching to a Touch ID subscription prompt under your finger?
        greglindahl 8y ago
        I'd bet that A/B testing would easily show that they make a lot more money if the users' finger is already on the reader from a recent press.
        wool_gather 8y ago
        No, I understand that, and maybe this is just a tangent, but the parent post seemed to be implying that the app was using the fingerprint itself, and I was trying to get a clarification. (And I'm honestly a little skeptical of the story.)
        madeofpalk 8y ago
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- kartickv 8y ago
  I agree. We've also had many rejections due to policies that weren't clearly stated up front, such as the price requiring to be in the button rather than below it. Apple should have given 10 examples of Dos and Don'ts with screenshots. Or even give five approved templates, so you can just change the price, duration, app name, etc and you're guaranteed to be approved. As another example, we put the terms and conditions ("subscription will renew unless canceled...") in a web view. Apple rejected us telling us to put it in the binary. We put the HTML locally, but still in a web view to display it. Is that considered part of the binary? Apparently not. We then made it plain text and didn't use a web view. But it wasn't okay, to have this behind a button. It has to be on the subscription screen. However, having it scroll off the bottom of the screen is apparently fine. This is why it's frustrating to develop for Apple's platforms — you have to play a guessing game, where each round results in a rejection and multiple days of turnaround time. I'm considering making our app paid up front to bypass this bullshit. Since the iOS dialog box has all the necessary information, and Apple can present it in a way they consider transparent to users, why make apps redundantly display the same information, and then reject them? The sensible thing to do would be to ban only apps that give misleading information, like Rs.10 if it actually costs Rs.100. Not giving any information in your app UI like price, duration, terms, should be fine.
nawtacawp 8y ago
In this same vein, apps that goto v2 then v3 under new app names (i.e Omnifocus) also feel a bit scammy. I understand the monetize angle, but they could be alienating users with large repurchase fees.
- dawnerd 8y ago
  Tweetbot has done that too - conveniently right before twitter cut off some api access making the app just an expensive ad free twitter client. I have no doubt they quickly pushed out v4 just to get a bump of cash. V5 just came out too (although this time a free upgrade).
  - bdcravens 8y ago
    v5 does prompt for an IAP (they're calling it a tip) Personally I paid the highest option ($4.99) because I know I've gotten plenty of value out of it, but I suspect most won't and there'll be pitchfork gathering about their "spammy popups"
    - lancewiggs 8y ago
      I paid for the upgrade just before deprecation of the API and except Tweetbot, and now their spammy pop ups are turning my admiration to annoyance and worse. The only reason I see for it is that they have decided they product (through Twitter’s actions) is doomed and are trying to milk has hard as they can.
- oflannabhra 8y ago
  I’m not sure what is scammy about that. That is how software was purchased for decades. ie, photoshop 1-7 & CS 1-6. It’s not like version x-1 stops working and forces you to purchase the new one.
  - prklmn 8y ago
    A lot of times if you update iOS, the app does stop working.
convery 8y ago
Good, an older friend of mine that barely knows how to access the appstore got charged 70€ a month without having any idea why.
- wpietri 8y ago
  This stuff makes my blood boil. However much I appreciate free markets in general (which is quite a bit) I don't think vulnerable users should be sacrificed on an ideological altar. Good for Apple stepping up here.
  - briandear 8y ago
    Actually both of your positions aren’t contradictory. Free markets are predicated on free flows of information: fully informing people of what they are potentially buying or agreeing to is not inconsistent with free markets. I’d argue that misleading information is really not a free market thing at all, quite the contrary. If your app is worth the money, you should gladly accept the price. The fact that some apps use “tricks” means that their app isn’t worth what is being asked.
    - wpietri 8y ago
      I'd personally agree, but a great many people who claim to be for free markets are in practice for unregulated markets. Their theory is that the invisible hand will optimize all things. To me that sounds more like an invisible magic sparkle pony. Having worked for financial traders, I got to see up close that some of our most effective markets are very tightly regulated, and for good reason. If a market participant can trust the deals on offer, trades are fast and frequent, and sellers compete on dimensions like price and quality. But if a seller can do well by scamming, that not only harms the people they trade with, but the market itself, in that trust is reduced. That raises costs for all buyers (because they have to do more verification work before each trade), and puts a burden on all sellers (because they have to work harder to prove they're not evil). It also reduces turnover, as increased risk means fewer deals done. So for me the question is how we get a free flow of accurate information. I think the obvious answer is tight regulation with a willingness to sanction deceptive actors. But for a lot of people, and they seem especially common here, that kind of regulation is anathema, as to them it's the opposite of "free".
variable11 8y ago
Why did it take so long? Scummy apps have existed for years.
- tempodox 8y ago
  Not only apps. There is a reason why the principle of “caveat emptor” was already known to the Romans. And your question is answered by the article: Now, Apple might get bad press over it.
Endy 8y ago
"...while his app offered real value -- unlike many of the other apps caught in this App Store review change..." Does anyone else find this comment as highly dubious and scummy as I do? Because it definitely feels to me like Mr. Koetsier isn't reporting objectively about a user-focused policy change, but rather just telling us that he's upset because his friend's subscription scam didn't work out thanks to Apple actually policing its Store in the users' favor.
- bdcravens 8y ago
  No, because of the rest of the sentence: "...the subscription flow would have easily saddled people with subscription charges that they might not have known about."
paulgb 8y ago
I can understand (even if I remain skeptical) how Facebook and Twitter claim to be unable to deal with prolific abuse patterns, but how the hell does Apple write a $14MM check to a scammy top-100 app[1] without some human checking that it's legit? [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/sneaky-subscriptions-are-plaguing-the-app-store/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/sneaky-subscriptions-are-p...
- jjeaff 8y ago
  Ya, it's pretty ridiculous. If they simply checked every app making even $1m a year, it wouldn't take them much effort at all.
- always_good 8y ago
  It's especially damning when the article points out that some apps were removed after the article-writer contacted Apple. Indicates that the process is clearly there at Apple, they just turn a blind eye. But wow, I expected a lot more from the billing UI of iOS apps. You can start a billing process just by making the user click a button? IMO everything billing should require a round-trip through a standard billing App Store page just like if you were to pay something online with PayPal. And I was especially amazed by how hard it is to see your subscriptions. I just checked mine and was subscribed to an app I completely forgot about. Think of the kind of UI you would design if you wanted to ensure people weren't making money from others unknowingly. You'd give Subscriptions its own tab in the App Store. You'd create notifications like "You just paid $5 to <App> (Recurring: weekly)". Even PayPal's app gets this right.
- lacker 8y ago
  Well, that’s probably exactly what happened, and now Apple is cracking down on this sort of app. They can’t just refuse to pay out that $14 mil to the app developer - these are bad user experiences that trick people into agreeing to subscriptions, but they aren’t clearly illegal. Apple does need to go through their own app review process when they want to boot an app, making sure there is a clear rule the app is not following.
  - paulgb 8y ago
briandear 8y ago
Apple themselves should promote their own native features more. For example, the built-in Notes app has fantastic document scanning already built in. Paying for a document scanning app is just mindless (generally.)
tgb 8y ago
How can Apple let people accidentally make purchases? Wouldn't anything charging to your credit card need an Apple pop-up with the listed price/rate to appear and you to accept it? I know people click "OK" to anything, but this seems obvious. I don't use an iPhone, so I'm not sure how it works but it seems pretty sketchy to allow apps to make arbitrary charges without any user confirmation.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  This is probably part of the reason that the payment popup became much more obtrusive (and incidentally nicer) in iOS 11. It doesn't look like a normal alert anymore.

42 points by wallflower 8y ago

I feel like this has been some months in the making. We have an IAP enabled app (https://www.bestcoffee.guide/app https://www.bestcoffee.guide/app) just turned a year old. When we launched last year we had no issues with our - very clear - subscription page. Subsequent updates, however, have required closer and closer adherence to the specifics of the Apple iap guidelines. All the boiler plate text needed to be displayed, the button needs the price on it, and to be on the same page. Overall a good change for the user but man it makes it hard to design a remotely aesthetic subscription page.

Endy 8y ago
As a user, I genuinely don't care about your aesthetic when it comes to your IAPs. I want a clear-as-day notice well in advance that you're asking to take real money for non-physical goods and/or services. If some group is working to make that clearer, I'm in favor.
- MOARDONGZPLZ 8y ago
  Seconded. I am very careful to make sure that I don't spend money unexpectedly in apps, and it can be pretty difficult. I'm all for any guidelines or regulations that make knowing when I'm going to be charged more explicit.
  - Endy 8y ago
    That's part of why I'd only use gift cards with very restricted budgets on paid software repositories.
  - MiddleEndian 8y ago
    Payments should be client controlled. Rather than you giving online organizations your payment information, they should request payments from you and you could manually approve or reject them. You could give certain trusted organizations you trust an auto accept option (for instance monthly web hosting bills).
- satysin 8y ago
  Agreed 100%. Hell a white page with generic Times New Roman font and generic buttons is perfect if it tells me how much I will be paying monthly, how long I am committed for and everything else that should be shown to me before I subscribe. If you can make it a little prettier that is fine but I want the cold hard facts over some cute parallax effect when I scroll the page
- madeofpalk 8y ago
  To be fair, that's _at least_ up to the OS, and iOS does do this. Every in app purchase has to be approved from an OS-provided dialogue that requires hardware interaction to approve. One problem I have seen from this was an ancestry app that prompted you to scan your fingerprint to "find your relatives", and then would prompt for IAP, which asks for Touch ID approval. Because you already had your thumb on the reader, it would more or less instantly be approved. Unsure if Apple has made any changes around this yet. https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/9bxw0f/this_ancestry_app_attempts_to_make_you_use_your/ https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/9bxw0f/this_ancestr...
  - wool_gather 8y ago
    Apps don't have access to the actual fingerprint data, though. Presumably they were just using it as a login guard?
    - jboles 8y ago
      The issue is not the app getting the fingerprint data, but rather literally baiting your finger onto the reader and then switching to a Touch ID subscription prompt under your finger?
      - greglindahl 8y ago
        I'd bet that A/B testing would easily show that they make a lot more money if the users' finger is already on the reader from a recent press.
      - wool_gather 8y ago
        No, I understand that, and maybe this is just a tangent, but the parent post seemed to be implying that the app was using the fingerprint itself, and I was trying to get a clarification. (And I'm honestly a little skeptical of the story.)
        madeofpalk 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
kartickv 8y ago
I agree. We've also had many rejections due to policies that weren't clearly stated up front, such as the price requiring to be in the button rather than below it. Apple should have given 10 examples of Dos and Don'ts with screenshots. Or even give five approved templates, so you can just change the price, duration, app name, etc and you're guaranteed to be approved. As another example, we put the terms and conditions ("subscription will renew unless canceled...") in a web view. Apple rejected us telling us to put it in the binary. We put the HTML locally, but still in a web view to display it. Is that considered part of the binary? Apparently not. We then made it plain text and didn't use a web view. But it wasn't okay, to have this behind a button. It has to be on the subscription screen. However, having it scroll off the bottom of the screen is apparently fine. This is why it's frustrating to develop for Apple's platforms — you have to play a guessing game, where each round results in a rejection and multiple days of turnaround time. I'm considering making our app paid up front to bypass this bullshit. Since the iOS dialog box has all the necessary information, and Apple can present it in a way they consider transparent to users, why make apps redundantly display the same information, and then reject them? The sensible thing to do would be to ban only apps that give misleading information, like Rs.10 if it actually costs Rs.100. Not giving any information in your app UI like price, duration, terms, should be fine.

nawtacawp 8y ago

In this same vein, apps that goto v2 then v3 under new app names (i.e Omnifocus) also feel a bit scammy. I understand the monetize angle, but they could be alienating users with large repurchase fees.

dawnerd 8y ago
Tweetbot has done that too - conveniently right before twitter cut off some api access making the app just an expensive ad free twitter client. I have no doubt they quickly pushed out v4 just to get a bump of cash. V5 just came out too (although this time a free upgrade).
- bdcravens 8y ago
  v5 does prompt for an IAP (they're calling it a tip) Personally I paid the highest option ($4.99) because I know I've gotten plenty of value out of it, but I suspect most won't and there'll be pitchfork gathering about their "spammy popups"
  - lancewiggs 8y ago
    I paid for the upgrade just before deprecation of the API and except Tweetbot, and now their spammy pop ups are turning my admiration to annoyance and worse. The only reason I see for it is that they have decided they product (through Twitter’s actions) is doomed and are trying to milk has hard as they can.
oflannabhra 8y ago
I’m not sure what is scammy about that. That is how software was purchased for decades. ie, photoshop 1-7 & CS 1-6. It’s not like version x-1 stops working and forces you to purchase the new one.
- prklmn 8y ago
  A lot of times if you update iOS, the app does stop working.

convery 8y ago

Good, an older friend of mine that barely knows how to access the appstore got charged 70€ a month without having any idea why.

wpietri 8y ago
This stuff makes my blood boil. However much I appreciate free markets in general (which is quite a bit) I don't think vulnerable users should be sacrificed on an ideological altar. Good for Apple stepping up here.
- briandear 8y ago
  Actually both of your positions aren’t contradictory. Free markets are predicated on free flows of information: fully informing people of what they are potentially buying or agreeing to is not inconsistent with free markets. I’d argue that misleading information is really not a free market thing at all, quite the contrary. If your app is worth the money, you should gladly accept the price. The fact that some apps use “tricks” means that their app isn’t worth what is being asked.
  - wpietri 8y ago
    I'd personally agree, but a great many people who claim to be for free markets are in practice for unregulated markets. Their theory is that the invisible hand will optimize all things. To me that sounds more like an invisible magic sparkle pony. Having worked for financial traders, I got to see up close that some of our most effective markets are very tightly regulated, and for good reason. If a market participant can trust the deals on offer, trades are fast and frequent, and sellers compete on dimensions like price and quality. But if a seller can do well by scamming, that not only harms the people they trade with, but the market itself, in that trust is reduced. That raises costs for all buyers (because they have to do more verification work before each trade), and puts a burden on all sellers (because they have to work harder to prove they're not evil). It also reduces turnover, as increased risk means fewer deals done. So for me the question is how we get a free flow of accurate information. I think the obvious answer is tight regulation with a willingness to sanction deceptive actors. But for a lot of people, and they seem especially common here, that kind of regulation is anathema, as to them it's the opposite of "free".

variable11 8y ago

Why did it take so long? Scummy apps have existed for years.

tempodox 8y ago
Not only apps. There is a reason why the principle of “caveat emptor” was already known to the Romans. And your question is answered by the article: Now, Apple might get bad press over it.

Endy 8y ago

"...while his app offered real value -- unlike many of the other apps caught in this App Store review change..." Does anyone else find this comment as highly dubious and scummy as I do? Because it definitely feels to me like Mr. Koetsier isn't reporting objectively about a user-focused policy change, but rather just telling us that he's upset because his friend's subscription scam didn't work out thanks to Apple actually policing its Store in the users' favor.

bdcravens 8y ago
No, because of the rest of the sentence: "...the subscription flow would have easily saddled people with subscription charges that they might not have known about."

paulgb 8y ago

I can understand (even if I remain skeptical) how Facebook and Twitter claim to be unable to deal with prolific abuse patterns, but how the hell does Apple write a $14MM check to a scammy top-100 app[1] without some human checking that it's legit? [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/sneaky-subscriptions-are-plaguing-the-app-store/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/sneaky-subscriptions-are-p...

jjeaff 8y ago
Ya, it's pretty ridiculous. If they simply checked every app making even $1m a year, it wouldn't take them much effort at all.
always_good 8y ago
It's especially damning when the article points out that some apps were removed after the article-writer contacted Apple. Indicates that the process is clearly there at Apple, they just turn a blind eye. But wow, I expected a lot more from the billing UI of iOS apps. You can start a billing process just by making the user click a button? IMO everything billing should require a round-trip through a standard billing App Store page just like if you were to pay something online with PayPal. And I was especially amazed by how hard it is to see your subscriptions. I just checked mine and was subscribed to an app I completely forgot about. Think of the kind of UI you would design if you wanted to ensure people weren't making money from others unknowingly. You'd give Subscriptions its own tab in the App Store. You'd create notifications like "You just paid $5 to <App> (Recurring: weekly)". Even PayPal's app gets this right.
lacker 8y ago
Well, that’s probably exactly what happened, and now Apple is cracking down on this sort of app. They can’t just refuse to pay out that $14 mil to the app developer - these are bad user experiences that trick people into agreeing to subscriptions, but they aren’t clearly illegal. Apple does need to go through their own app review process when they want to boot an app, making sure there is a clear rule the app is not following.
- paulgb 8y ago

briandear 8y ago

Apple themselves should promote their own native features more. For example, the built-in Notes app has fantastic document scanning already built in. Paying for a document scanning app is just mindless (generally.)

tgb 8y ago

How can Apple let people accidentally make purchases? Wouldn't anything charging to your credit card need an Apple pop-up with the listed price/rate to appear and you to accept it? I know people click "OK" to anything, but this seems obvious. I don't use an iPhone, so I'm not sure how it works but it seems pretty sketchy to allow apps to make arbitrary charges without any user confirmation.

wool_gather 8y ago
This is probably part of the reason that the payment popup became much more obtrusive (and incidentally nicer) in iOS 11. It doesn't look like a normal alert anymore.